Epigram Books > Epigram Books's Quotes

“There are things that cut through swathes of memory, there are things you take with you that are non-essential, that drag you down, but you can't offload them because there is only one way to throw them overboard and that is for you to walk the plank.”
― Amanda Lee Koe, Ministry of Moral Panic

“Soon I find myself squatting on the floor. I am still striking my face; not with my fists this time, but with wide-open hands. I am slapping myself. The sounds I make when my palms meet my cheeks are like an unrelenting round of applause. I am clapping myself. Or clapping for myself. I start to giggle.

All the voices are receding now. I am no longer filled with rage or disappointment. I clap and clap and simply cannot stop.”
― Cyril Wong, Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me and Other Stories

“Brian organised for the body to be flown back.”
― Jolene Tan, A Certain Exposure

“Coincidence sometimes happens as in a fairy tale. Wong was in an emotional state of mind. Still smoking opium, he thought about Kwang’s long-dead father, who had arrived in Singapore from Amoy on the junk Nam Hong. The opium den now felt bare and lonely without all the old vibrations. It was also dark and damp and the small kerosene lamp was running low on fuel. Wong added more kerosene and mumbled to himself, “Tonight I am going to smoke my way to heaven!”
― Ming Cher, Spider boys

“English. That was where I met him.”
― Andrew Koh, Glass Cathedral

“The rain is a screen that changes the colour of the sky, causing a sepia filter to fall over the city. It is as if the city has gone back in time, to the age before the invention of full-coloured photographs. Light becomes suffused and quiet.”
― Justin Ker, The Space Between the Raindrops

“Time will solve all the problems Chinese school graduates face. In our bilingual society, there are no more Chinese school graduates, only English school graduates who can speak Mandarin. These English school graduates probably can also read and write Chinese, but they did not go to a Chinese school, and they act and think differently from us. Drawing a line between us, they would never say they graduated from a Chinese school, because former Chinese school graduates, that is, the vanishing group of people that includes us, are second-class citizens. They, on the other hand, belong to the first class, the Chinese elite, English school graduates who are fluent in Chinese.”
― Yeng Pway Ngon, Trivialities About Me and Myself

“My mind skipped to a sunlit Saturday morning a few months ago when Noah was supposed to be revising for his exams. I caught him looking out the window instead, distracted by a roving butterfly. “Noah, you’re supposed to be studying!” I scolded.

He replied languidly, “I am! I’m studying what’s out there.”
― Monica Lim, The Good, the Bad and the PSLE: Trials of an Almost Kiasu Mother

“Throughout these pages, my brush weeps in sorrow for what happened in Tiananmen Square.

Not for the first time, a government was turning the guns on its people. Has the world learned nothing from history?”
― Morgan Chua, Tiananmen

“Among Chinese Singaporeans and Malaysians, many hold the belief that when Admiral Cheng Ho landed in Nanyang, he relieved himself in the jungle, and the steaming puddle of shit and piss evolved into the durian tree. To put it less elegantly, the mounds of flesh inside the durian resemble a row of little turds, resting neatly in a boat-shaped husk.”
― Wong Yoon Wah, Durians Are Not the Only Fruit

“His wife had also studied art in her hometown, and she could paint, but depending on such work for her livelihood was just not possible. As far as appearances went, she was definitely a real beauty. When she was young, she looked a little like Gong Li, but now that she was middle-aged, she had put on weight and gradually taken on more of a bell-shaped look, resembling Li Siqin. But no matter what, a wife always looks better than her balding, broadbellied husband.”
― Chew Kok Chang, Other Cities, Other Lives

“I like to see you in a sari, with your long hair dressed in a single plait. Don't forget that I married a girl from India because I like my wife to be conservative and feminine.”
― K. Kanagalatha, The Goddess in the Living Room

“I mostly believe, deep in my bones, that life is very simply beyond description; regardless of what one makes of it, life always spills over the parameters of how anyone has chosen to define it.”
― Cyril Wong, The Last Lesson of Mrs de Souza

“Pak Suleh recalled the atmosphere on his island of Pulau Sebidang, which had been ruled by his ancestors for more than a hundred years. Now it had been passed to foreign hands—whichever nation from whatever foreign world which had been claiming the island was theirs—such that he and his ancestors who had lived on that island for generation after generation had been chased away to live in these birdhouses. They had now inherited these congested breathing diseases.

Why was it that he could no longer enjoy the wind which blows from the sea, which is very much one of God’s incomparable benevolences? He could no longer savour the swaying coconut trees, ketapang trees, beringin trees and other trees which whistled and murmured when caressed by the winds as their dried leaves fell onto the sand, mixed with red and white flowers scattered all over the pristine white beach, resembling the moving clouds on a wide piece of white paper.

I have lost everything, thought Pak Suleh deep in his heart.”
― Suratman Markasan, Penghulu

“Dear family,

I am drafting a new laundry protocol for better and more considerate usage of the washing machine”
― Koh Choon Hwee, Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume One

“For her and Nurul merely to share a meal cooked in their own kitchen was a triumph; to wake up together each morning a luxury.”
― Jolene Tan, A Certain Exposure

“Soon we were downloading ourselves
into laptops, phones or pads, freer
than we had hoped,

floating centrifugally across the Internet
to swim alongside forgotten
selfies, spam emails and porn”
― Cyril Wong, LONTAR #3

“Perhaps she moves too slowly now, or the world moves too fast for her. She enters the lift, a giant wheel turns and steel cables lower the mechanized box. The lift drops down a black shaft, which exists at the heart of each HDB block. The country may be described, not as a place covered with blocks of public housing, but a topography where black vertical shafts, some forty storeys tall, rise out of the ground like trees.”
― Justin Ker, The Space Between the Raindrops

“Small people need to talk more loudly to be heard.
Well I'm small aren't I, I'm not even 1.6 metres tall, but you don't see me raising my voice.
Maybe you're okay with not being heard.
I just want to be heard by the right people. The right person.”
― Amanda Lee Koe, Ministry of Moral Panic

“It was the driest season the island had ever known. The heat which had accumulated during the long days still seemed to hover over the city, stifling its inhabitants. Usually they streamed on to the water front at night, sweating, wondering, in the gustatory atmosphere, moving in clusters or striking out alone.”
― Lloyd Fernando, Scorpion Orchid

“The deaths—tiny ones, false ones, real ones—we undertake in the name of love are the closest that we ever come to greatness.”
― Amanda Lee Koe, Ministry of Moral Panic

“In the city, human beings celebrated and enjoyed material conditions and comforts, but were caught in the labyrinths and knots of spiritual shallowness and psychological confusion. In the city human beings wrestled with the demands of survival and profit but fled from life’s imperatives of honesty and moderation. In the city man was afraid to confront his own face.”
― Isa Kamari, The Tower

“I keep seeing this ad on TV. It talks about teachers. Thank you for teaching me. Thank you for changing my life. They all look happy. Have they always been this happy? Did they have a perfect childhood? A perfect school life? I was happy once. But I was young. The older you get, the more you remember. The younger you are, the more you forget.”
― Haresh Sharma, Those Who Can’t, Teach

“It is a strange thing, looking at the sea. When it is calm, or with only gentle ripples, it gives an impression of being soft and kind. But often, on such a calm, the wind suddenly blows, thrusting the water back into angry waves. At such times, in a certain sense, one feels sorry for the sea. Never of itself offensive to others, it is all too often attacked by wind and rain, the rain falling densely upon it, shaming the beauty of its calm face with a million bouncing bubbles. Were the wind to stop blowing, the ocean, surely, would never afflict the land with any calamity, nor would any human beings suffer.”
― Tan Kok Seng, Son of Singapore

“The sensation of the ocean bearing my weight was the most carefree lightness I’d ever experienced. When we were halfway across the strait, the sound of an engine approached from a distance—it was probably the police coast guard. We quickly ducked under the surface of the water, exposing only the tips of our trunks so we could breathe.”
― Xi Ni Er, The Earnest Mask

“It was past midnight. From the carpark of the apartment blocks, a human figure with an unsteady gait emerged.”
― Lim Thean Soo, Ricky Star

“In its basic form, nursing can be seen as a duty, but beyond the incessant operational activities that lay the foundation of our daily work, the profession is all about grace. Helping people is a noble calling. It is a privilege to serve my fellow human beings. Fifteen years has seen many ups and downs at the workplace, but I have enjoyed serving the many patients who come into my care, and have prayed for the souls of those who were on the brink of death.”
― Katherine Soh, Nurse Molly Returns

“There are myriad kisses in a relationship: desperate ones as involuntary as breathing, stolen ones on crowded trains, ceremonial ones at the front door, routine ones as dispassionate as licking an envelope. It takes two to kiss, but does it take two to hold the memory?”
― Stephanie Ye, Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume One

“There was once an abbot who had spent thirty-nine years alone in the temple with cats as his only companions. As someone who believed that faith and willpower could conquer any difficulty, the abbot began training newborn kittens, trying to turn the impossible into the possible. First he put the rattan hoop on the ground for the kittens to crawl through. Then he slowly raised the hoop little by little, day after day, month after month, and year after year. Years went by and the hoop was gradually raised until he finally succeeded in getting the cats to jump through the hoop. An unusual phenomenon occurred. When the kittens saw the older cats jump, they believed they could do it too and so, without much effort, they learned to jump easily through the hoop as well.”
― You Jin, Teaching Cats to Jump Hoops

“The exhausted earth groaned and quivered under the monotonous glare of the sun. Spirals of heat rose from the ground as if from molten lava. A panting lizard crawled painfully over the fevered rock in search of a shady crevice. Cattle and dogs cringed under the scanty shade of the trees and waited for the rain to deliver them from the heat and thirst. Instead the heat grew more intense and oppressive each day, singeing and stifling all living things with an invisible sheet of fire, which only the rain could put out.

The drought had persisted for over a month.”
― S. Rajaratnam, The Short Stories and Radio Plays of S. Rajaratnam