The Book of Records Quotes

“As I prepare to leave pages for Wei, I try to listen for his questions. I suspect that our lives have run in parallel, that the two halves of our story can never end without the other. At last, I think I hear him but he bears no questions and no answers. Instead, he tells me that because it is forever unfinished, we have sought each other in the faces of strangers, among the living and the dead, among the mothers and the fathers, and he tells me that his journey appears everywhere I look. Love, he tells me, like devotion, leaves everything unfinished.”
― Madeleine Thien, The Book of Records

“Could he love a chair or a bird as he loved another person? It must be, he thought, that the way we treat things, people, animals and even ourselves, is in accordance with our beliefs about them. What we do is a mirror of the ultimate unvarnished beliefs we hold. Was belief so fundamental, so powerful? If so, he mustn’t let his thoughts rush by, automatic and unnoticed. He must attend to all that gives rise to belief.”
― Madeleine Thien, The Book of Records: A Novel

“Being forbidden to show gratitude for your services, I leave you my one remaining possession and my best: the pattern of my life.”
― Madeleine Thien, The Book of Records: A Novel

“What’s that saying again? ‘Heavy is the root of light.”
― Madeleine Thien, The Book of Records

“Everything I know is aftermath.”
― Madeleine Thien, The Book of Records

“And was it Spinoza or another who spoke of despair receding, replaced by something which could only arise from a more shrouded realm: hopeless hope, nurtured in darkness, created by the freest part of each and every person?”
― Madeleine Thien, The Book of Records

“Safely tucked into Hannah’s bag was Time Regained, which insisted that when one has knocked at all the doors which lead nowhere, one stumbles without knowing it on the only door through which one can enter—which one might have sought in vain for a hundred years—and it opens.”
― Madeleine Thien, The Book of Records

“Some people have imaginations that have imaginations of their own,” added Jupiter.”
― Madeleine Thien, The Book of Records