Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

to fear that you yourself were born in the wrong moment of history.

It is not in me, she realized, to fall in love with someone who would wait. I can never settle for half a freedom.

in general, anything universally praised is usually preposterous rubbish.”

I possessed what every great mathematician required, an excellent memory and a sense of poetry.

“Some of these peasants, these desperate people,” he continued, “have to be forced to remember every humiliation. Forced! They have to be driven nearly out of their minds with grief before they can find the courage to pick up their knives

Anything that inspires such devotion is surely banned.”

“I no longer wish to live with restraints, Teacher. I wish to cast off the ordinary.

“The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom,”

Everything correct becomes something poisoned.

The future is arriving. We’ve come all this way to meet it.” “Or maybe,” he said, “it’s we who keep returning to the same moment.”

“Music that is immediately understood will not outlast its generation.”