Sunyi Dean > Sunyi's Quotes

“Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came toseemtrue. Thisexercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry. ”
― T.S. Eliot

“No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.”
― T.S. Eliot.

“In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Oriel didn’t move. But inside of his head, all was movement, like a river running over rapids, searching for the way through, trying routes around rocks and over shallows, a turbulence of thought more rapid than he could follow. Griff, he knew, would do and say nothing until he heard Oriel’s choice.”
― Cynthia Voigt, The Wings of a Falcon

“He held the whip that and made those marks, and drawn that blood, and he was ashamed. He held the whip that could make more marks on the flesh of Nikol’s back. While Nikol begged.”
― Cynthia Voigt, The Wings of a Falcon

“He knew from the first that this man would know how to hurt him.”
― Cynthia Voigt, The Wings of a Falcon

“As long as the heart beats, as long as body and soul keep together, I cannot admit that any creature endowed with a will has need to despair of life.”
― Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

“I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”
― John Milton, Areopagitica

“None of us are truly good,” the vicar said, at last. He put a hand on her shoulder, so gently, so kindly, and she almost threw up on the spot. “All we can do is live by the light we are given.”

“Some of us don’t have any light,” Devon said. “How are we supposed to live, then?”
― Sunyi Dean, The Book Eaters

“Like Nycteris, she thought, and cringed.

There was an old fairy tale called The History of Photogen and Nycteris that she still carried a copy of. The main character in it was a young woman who had been raised by a cruel witch, inside a cave beneath a castle.
The girl had grown up knowing only darkness, which at the time hadn’t seemed much of an issue to child-Devon.

But the general idea was that Nycteris’s world was narrow: she thought the lamp in her cave was a sun, and that the universe was just a tiny series of rooms. She knew nothing of society and had very few books. A relatable situation, for a book eater woman.

One day, Nycteris escaped her cave by following a stray firefly. She ended up in the castle garden. But her reactions in the story were strange and unexpected. Upon espying the moon for the first time, Nycteris decided that it must be a giant lamp, akin to the one in her cave. She saw the sky, and likewise decided it must be another kind of roof. And when she looked at the horizon, she saw not a limitless world, but merely another room, albeit with distant walls.

The concept of outside didn’t exist for one such as Nycteris, nor could it ever. Her upbringing had given her such a fixed perspective that, even when encountering something new, she could only process it along the lines already drawn for her.

The story’s complexity had baffled Devon as a child, but she understood it well enough now. The truth was, Nycteris never really escaped. Oh, she got a prince and a castle and the cruel witch died at the end. But Nycteris could not ever leave the cave, because the cave was a place in her mind; it was the entire way she thought about reality.

Princesses like that couldn’t be rescued.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Book Eaters

“Devon jogged after, body angled awkwardly to face the other woman. “Hes, answer me this. Why do you think so few women run away? Why do you think nothing really changes for book eaters, century after century?”

“How should I bloody know!”

“We lack imagination,” Devon said, relentless. “Even if we used Dictaphones and scribes, we’d never be able to write books the way humans can. We struggle to innovate, are barely able to adapt, and end up stuck in our traditions. Just eating the same books generation after generation, thinking along the same rigid lines. Creativity is our world and yet we aren’t creative.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Book Eaters

“I should have run sooner,” Devon said, voice cracking a little. “But I didn’t. Know what really stopped me? My lack of imagination, the same one that all ’eaters suffer from. I could not imagine a better or different future, Hes, and because I could not imagine it, I assumed it didn’t exist.” Her throat was lumping up. “I was wrong. Life can be different.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Book Eaters

“Stillness pooled like blood and Devon sat, stunned and terrified to move in case her universe tilted again. The aunts were already cleaning up: wiping blood off her legs, changing the sheets around her as best they could. Someone carried the placenta away.

“Your milk will be black, when it comes in,” Gailey said. “Don’t be alarmed by that. All perfectly normal.”

Devon just nodded, too overwhelmed to speak. Perfectly normal? How could anything be normal ever again? Her life had been a series of twisted fairy tales in which she had imagined herself the princess, but this, here, living and breathing and snuffling in her arms, had more truth than all of her swallowed stories combined.

She was her daughter’s whole world, a realization both humbling and empowering. Devon had never been anybody’s world before—had never been anything at all, in fact, except the sum of paper flesh she’d consumed without thought.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Book Eaters

“For here was the thing that no fairy tale would ever admit, but that she understood in that moment: love was not inherently good.

Certainly, it could inspire goodness. She didn’t argue that. Poets would tell you that love was electricity in your veins that could light a room. That it was a river in your soul to lift you up and carry you away, or a fire inside the heart to keep you warm.

Yet electricity could also fry, rivers could drown, and fires could burn; love could be destructive. Punishingly, fatally destructive.

And the other thing, the real bloody clincher of it all, was that the good and the bad didn’t get served up equally. If love were a balance of electric lights and electric jolts, two sides of an equally weighted coin, then fair enough. She could deal.

That wasn’t how it worked, though. Some love was just the bad, all the time: an endless parade of electrified bones and drowned lungs and hearts that burned to a cinder inside the cage of your chest.

And so she looked down at her son and loved him with the kind of twisted, complex feeling that came from having never wanted him in the first place; she loved him with bitterness, and she loved him with resignation. She loved him though she knew no good could ever come from such a bond.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Book Eaters

“Maybe, Devon thought, that was the best anybody could hope for in life: to be missed when gone, however one had lived.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Book Eaters

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“Creating individuality, which creates and protects others' individualities is good.”
― Zaman Ali, MORALITY An Individual Dilemma

“The boat draws closer. It is indeed misty, the atmosphere cloying with the promise of rain. A cool breeze rolls in from the east. Squint, shade your eyes, and try to peer vainly into that white haze, seeking a first glimpse of your destination.

Then the sun comes out, quick as a child’s smile; clouds part at her warm touch. And Shek Kan Chau seems to rise in front of you like a woman surfacing for air.

Sunlight shimmers on the water. Boxy houses, brightly painted, refract colour at unexpected angles. Glossy mangroves fuzz the shoreline as the boat glides towards docking, offering glimpses of tangled forests further inland. Scintillating peace lingers.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl With a Thousand Faces

“Mami grew up with war and natural disaster, the way other children are raised with siblings. She has suffered much. She raised you as she had been raised, with a sharp tongue and a heavy hand, her mind bent always towards worry. Your endless chatter aroused her ire, and her stern ways provoked your scorn.

Here is a short list of your ‘flaws’, as she saw them, which drove her to frustration.

You could not sleep, at least not very well. That restless spirit honed her tiredness to a teetering edge of exhaustion.

You could not stop climbing on chairs, tables, cabinets, like a monkey in search of the forest canopy.

Your fingers seemed to be made of water; everything slipped through them, or out of them. You caused so much breakage. Carrying dishes was a risk and washing them only slightly safer.

And you talked too much, as if your mouth were a teapot that continually poured out its brain to the world at large. Every day, you buzzed with too much energy, a thrumming lute-string of a girl, jittering into trouble.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl With a Thousand Faces

“It is so easy, when looking back on our lives, to judge relationships only on how they ended, or how they broke down. In the wake of estrangement and arguments, it is so difficult to remember the joy we once felt in another’s presence.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl With a Thousand Faces

“The heart can live with loneliness if it has never known anything better. What it cannot live with is finding companionship, and then losing it again.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl With a Thousand Faces

“You destroyed me. More than destroyed me! Everything I thought worthy in myself, you have stripped away, and showed me to be false. Because of you, I know how awful I can be. Because of you, I have killed and killed and killed, hated and loathed and lied and stolen! I can't go back to being better. How the hell could anyone forgive that?”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl With a Thousand Faces

“A second chance. For you, for her, for life to prove you both wrong: that not everyone leaves, betrays, or abandons forever. That forgiveness is real, and that sometimes—just sometimes—there can be peace, even after long war.

Step into an ocean that glitters like crystal, foam brushing your knees and surf rolling over your thighs. Swim without fear, letting the currents of fate and time draw you to waters where the ground falls away, leaving you suspended in the green. Draw a slow, singular breath.

And
​then
​​​you
​​​​​look
​​​​​​​down.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl With a Thousand Faces

“War came to your lives, unwanted yet predictable, like the cycle of yearly storms, like the crash of a rising tide, and drowned everything in its path.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl With a Thousand Faces

“The dead girl blinked first one eye, and then the other. “Do you remember the island, Chen Mei Chi?”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“Soon enough, the narrow sidewalks fill with the riotous dead: ghosts with bony faces and iron needles for hair, ghosts with multiple heads, ghosts with stinking, bulbous growths that ooze pus or acid. Ghosts with pinprick mouths and distended bellies, whistling hideously as they beg for food they cannot eat. Ghosts who have taken on animal traits, with claws or gills or spikes. Ghosts who look normal, yet their flesh is lighter than mist. Ghosts who are pools of inhuman darkness, ghosts with exploded bodies or bleeding eyes, ghosts who swing from lampposts by their own viscera, ghosts whose heads detach or whose necks unwind like ribbons, ghosts heaving with diseases and scabs, beautiful ghosts with white hair and red dresses who scream like air raid sirens. Ghosts who look like little old ladies or fragile young children until you touch them on the shoulder and they turn around, ravenous of tooth and shrieking with demonic fury.

Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts everywhere.

Spirits flow and tumble and streak through alleys, over railings, up concrete steps, in gutters and in sewers, from rooftops and electrical lines, clawing or baying at warded windows and protected doorways, coming after the unlucky living to cause torment or even death.

It is malice, but undirected malice; the wild, flailing trauma of many thousands of lives cut short through mass-scale violence. When the ghosts cannot find humans to torment, they turn on each other, bigger ones shredding smaller ones. For these are the years of war and devastation, when the distressed dead far outnumber the peaceful dead, and threaten to outnumber the fearful living.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“Mercy opened her eyes. Well, the one eye, anyway. The ceiling was dripping, the walls wet with moisture. The central drain was flooding, seawater welling up, the reek of brine overpowering the stench of blood and filth; a welcome change.

And Sea Sister was there. That monstrous, ocean-drenched young woman, wearing the same ragged clothes. As always. “You,” Mercy rasped, through burst lips. “You are the key to all of this. Help me understand. Why is any of this happening to me, and why is it happening now?”

Sea Sister drifted over. With every step she drew closer, the level of water rose a little in the room until it was almost knee-deep. Mercy floated on her back, unable to move, neck twisted to keep the monster in her sights.

When she was standing with her knees against Mercy’s shoulders, Sea Sister stopped and peered down. Water dripped from the ends of her hair. Pearly eyes did not blink.

“I’ve been examined by every exorcist in the city, and they all tell me I’m not haunted,” Mercy said, words slurred through her busted lips. “But even if you’re not haunting me, even if you’re just a dream, you carry my secrets. And on the other side of you are all the memories that I’ve lost. I need to know what’s so bad and wrong about my past.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“I recall your birth, though you do not. I remember that humid, quiet evening in 1922, your Mami laboring in the privacy of her cramped Hong Kong harbor flat. The bed was too hot, so she took to the floor, damp cloths easing her backache. Soon after, infant-you had the shock of emerging to the world, and being lifted to her chest by hands that were warm and kind.

It was one of the few times that your mother was any sort of gentle.

If that sounds like a harsh indictment of her, it isn’t meant to be. Mami grew up with war and natural disaster, the way other children are raised with siblings. She has suffered much.

When you were born, she tried to put aside her disappointment, and never quite succeeded. She had hoped for a studious boy, but got a careless girl; she hoped for more children, yet no others arrived. All her expectations were therefore pinned on you, and no one child can live up to that.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces