The Passing of the Dragon Quotes

“Life is one long story we tell ourselves to make sense of the world, and in our quest for meaning, we make other people players in our own psychomachia. Sometimes the consequence of doing that can be terrible, like what happened to me. But it’s worth remembering that everyone is trying their best to look for their dragon, to find the heart of their story, and to then tell it as well as they are able”
― Ken Liu, The Passing of the Dragon

“In that moment, she understands all the poems she has ever read; she grasps all the paintings and statues and photographs she has ever puzzled over; she sees the grace in every sidewalk crack, every wearily slumped shoulder, every tired face asking, What is this about? She understands it all, sees it all, accepts it all. Everyone is heroic, the protagonist of their story, the only story they’ll know from the inside out—true, unflinching, joyous in the face of the void. There is light in everything. It is all so beautiful.”
― Ken Liu, The Passing of the Dragon

“That’s the thing about depression. It oozes around you until all the color is drained and you think it’s normal, that the world has always been that way. But then a friend shows up and reminds you that that’s not true.”
― Ken Liu, The Passing of the Dragon

“We’re all doing our best to see the dragon and record its passing.”
― Ken Liu, The Passing of the Dragon

“We’re all trying to tell our own story, And we make other people parts of our own stories. We’re meant to bring our stories together, to speak and listen and know that the stories are real and they matter.”
― Ken Liu, The Passing of the Dragon

“Buzzwords, devalued and bleached through overuse in the cultural wars, are cast about like clutched pearls.”
― Ken Liu, The Passing of the Dragon

“Between the frozen sea and the snowbound earth, she’s a stick figure moving between white and white, leaving behind an extended ellipsis on a blank page, a Pollockian dribble against an empty canvas.”
― Ken Liu, The Passing of the Dragon

“Seven-and-seventy years in a shoebox,
The penciled dates fading, gone,
Scales of the dragon I can never know . . .”
― Ken Liu, The Passing of the Dragon