The Garden of Evening Mists Quotes

“Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“The palest ink will endure beyond the memories of man”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?”
― Twan Eng Tan, The Garden of Evening Mists

“I have become a collapsing star, pulling everything around it, even the light, into an ever-expanding void. Once I lose all ability to communicate with the world outside myself, nothing will be left but what I remember. My memories will be like a sandbar, cut off from the shore by the incoming tide. In time they will become submerged, inaccessible to me. The prospect terrified me. For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“That point in time just as the last leaf is about to drop, as the remaining petal is about to fall; that moment captures everything beautiful and sorrowful about life. Mono no aware, the Japanese call it.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Anything beautiful should be given a name, do you not agree?”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Die while I can still remember who I am, who I used to be.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Memories I had locked away have begun to break free, like shards of ice fracturing off an arctic shelf. In sleep, these broken floes drift toward the morning light of remembrance.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“We were like two moths around a candle, I thought, circling closer and closer to the flame, waiting to see whose wings would catch fire first.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Before me lies a voyage of a million miles, and my memory is the moonlight I will borrow to illuminate my way.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Feel your body expanding as you breathe: that is where we live, in the moments between each inhalation and exhalation.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“It begins to rain softly, raising goose-pimples on the pond’s skin.”
― Twan Eng Tan, The Garden of Evening Mists

“A raintree bent towards a window in one side of the bungalow, eavesdropping on the conversations that had taken place inside over years.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“I will dance to the music of words, for one more time.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“The tree of life is already doomed from the moment it is planted.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“A garden is composed of a variety of clocks, Aritomo had once told me. Some of them run faster than the others, and some of them move slower than wee can ever perceive. I only understood this fully long after I had been his apprentice.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Time did not exist; I had no idea of how many minutes had passed. And what was time but merely a wind that never stopped?”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Some element in the air between us changed, as though a wind that had been blowing gently had come to an abrupt stillness.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“I realize that there are fragments of my life that I do not want to lose, if only because I still have not found the knot to tie them up with.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“It was odd how Aritomo's life seemed to glance off mine; we were like two leaves falling from a tree, touching each other now and again as they spiraled to the forest floor.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“You’ve forgiven the British?” He subsided into his seat. For a while he was silent, his gaze turned inward. “They couldn’t kill me when we were at war. And they couldn’t kill me when I was in the camp,” he said finally, his voice subdued. “But holding on to my hatred for forty-six years . . . that would have killed me.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“The practice of designing gardens had originated in the temples of China, where the work was done by monks. Gardens were created to approximate the idea of a paradise in the afterlife.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Time is eating away my memory. Time, and this illness, this trespasser in my brain.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“And what was time but merely a wind that never stopped?”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Bats are flooding out from the hundreds of caves that perforate these mountainsides. I watch them plunge into the mists without any hesitation, trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly. Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analyzing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“When the First Man and First Woman were banished from their home, Time was also set loose upon the world.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“I have become a collapsing star, pulling everything around it, even the light, into an ever-expanding void.”
― Twan Eng Tan, The Garden of Evening Mists

“I am an echo of a sound made a lifetime ago.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

“Standing there with our heads tilted back to the sky, our faces lit by ancient starlight and the dying fires of those fragments of a planet broken up long ago, I forgot where I was, what I had gone through, what I had lost.”
― Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists