The Girl with a Thousand Faces Quotes

“If each person only corrects the crimes that they have committed themselves, then the world will be full of pain, because evil men do not care about injustice, and so never correct their own.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“War does not finish,” he said, heavily. “It is not a game that stops when enough players quit. It is a wound, sinking into flesh, leaving scars and rot that cause pain for a long time.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“On the surface, what we do will be an easy task. But the truth is, forgiveness is never easy. The heart is afraid to let go.

When hurt is all we’ve known, we are reluctant to relinquish it, and we fear to venture into unfamiliar lands.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“When pain becomes a way of existence, we stop hoping for an end to the suffering. The death of hope is its own resilience.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“Pain and grief are holes that never fill. We just learn to step around them as we walk.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“Pain doesn’t end with death. Karma doesn’t die with the body. Hate and anger continue, one generation to the next, as souls return damaged and we build an ever more twisted society. I think humanity must have always been like this. I think this is why we all hurt, all the time.”
― 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

“Then what will heal me?” you snarl, unable to stop yourself from asking the question. “Since you’re so wise and have so much wisdom!” Nothing, she says, simply and sadly. Pain and grief are holes that never fill. We just learn to step around them as we walk.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“Pain doesn’t end with death. Karma doesn’t die with the body. Hate and anger continue, one generation to the next, as souls return damaged and we build an ever more twisted society. I think humanity must have always been like this. I think this is why we all hurt, all the time.”
From a long time ago, your traitorous memory summons up the mental image of Baba seated at the kitchen table, and the words he’d said once so long ago: War does not finish. It is a wound, sinking into flesh, leaving scars and rot that cause pain for a long time.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“The first truth: humans did not have true sympathy for another person’s pain, unless they experienced it themselves. The wealthy dismissed the poor, the healthy dismissed the sick, citizens dismissed refugees, men dismissed women, and so on. It was not until the wealthy became poor, the healthy became sick, citizens became refugees, or men suffered as women suffer, that people could truly understand another’s experiences. Even you hadn’t really grasped Mei Chi’s pain, until you became a ghost, too.
From this, you concluded that suffering was not a thing to be transcended, as Buddha had taught, but a thing to be universally shared as widely as possible. Only through suffering could compassion flourish. Pain was the greatest of all teachers, and humanity was chronically ignorant.
The second truth: those who lacked sympathy were also those who caused the most suffering. This was ironclad and immutably true. If the wealthy knew poverty, they would be kinder to the poor. If men understood women’s lives, they would behave with more gentleness. If politicians suffered in trenches, they would think twice about sending young men to war. And so on. Therefore, it was imperative to inflict on them what they had done to others, or society could not improve.
Third: the most unbearable thing about pain was knowing that those who hurt you did not even comprehend your hurt. Often they neither saw nor cared about it, and carried on with their lives, wrapped up in their own concerns. This forgetting, this ignorance, torments victims more than the actual crime in many cases.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“It is notable, too, that most of these ghosts were women or members of the underclasses. That should surprise no one. Those who lack power in life carry an unequal share of injustice into death. Returning from the grave is their only recourse to right those wrongs.

And you, as a ghost, definitely have a lot of injustices to be angry about.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“Pain cannot be left buried”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“Whatever you meant or didn’t mean”
― 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”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“Again”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“The living walk through life half asleep. The dead are wide awake, they are connected deeply to the spirit world, and they cannot shut their eyes or rest.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“Life has been so bleak, for so many months, that you've forgotten how to be happy.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“Only extremely suspect people hid themselves in furniture without a good explanation, and she had none.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“When we met, a fire started again in my heart, one I thought had gone out forever. I saw in you the victory that could be won for our city. I believed again, after I had thought my faith in the cause turned to dust. In the darkest moments of that war, you burned through my despair.” He pauses, and you get the sense he’s fighting back tears. “Whatever else you may have done or be guilty of, I will never forget how you fought, or the gift of hope you brought to me and my soldiers.”

“I feel like all I did was destroy.” The words tumble out of you, unbidden. “I’m not a builder of anything, hope or otherwise.”

“I think you do yourself an injustice, Siu Yin.” Wing Yun dabs his eyes, and smiles. “The price of peace is always death. Every year of good fortune is paid for in war, and the cost of those lives means you and I can sit here, now, and breathe air quietly. You paid for us to live.”

“And when will it be my turn to live?” Heaviness squeezes your chest, a feeling not unlike the ache of drowning.

“That, I don’t know. But I believe the future holds more for you than vengeance. If you want it to.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“She gathers you close amidst the churning currents. Never doubt that I will always love you, she whispers, and she dives.

This time, there is no going up. No return to the surface. There’s a certain strange peace in that knowledge.

At least you won’t be alone, you tell yourself. Even if the only person who stays with you is your murderer, it is still better than dying by yourself. You do not resist as she bears you down, nor do you cry (no tears beneath the ocean, after all). Instead, you think of Baba, crouched over the kitchen table as he whispers, All things are transient because now you understand him, so perfectly well.

Darkness encroaches, still and quiet; the storm cannot touch these depths.

Pressure compresses your lungs and bursts in your ears and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all. Your silence matches Sea Sister’s in this salt-tinged world she inhabits.

Then death arrives like a sudden breeze, and blows your spirit clean away.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“In the ocean, no one can cry without drowning. Sorrow is silent beneath the waves.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“I’m here,” you call out, feet planted in the sand.

Beneath the water, she smiles wide in answer.

Step free of your shirt and trousers. Throw your hair into a tucked bun, tie it tight, and leap into the cool green sea with hands splayed and knees bent. As the currents swirl round, you reach out, taking her extended hand; she pulls you close and the pair of you cut through the water at her knifing, lurching speed.

You play tag games in the water most afternoons, which of course you cannot ever win, even when she closes her eyes and twists a hand behind her back. Still, it’s fun. She catches fish, caging them in her long-fingered hands so that you can see them up close. Sometimes urchins, too, and once an octopus. The octopus isn’t afraid, and wraps a tentacle thoughtfully around your wrist before jetting off.

Sea Sister is as dangerous as the ocean itself. Logically, you know this. She has those teeth for a reason, and once or twice—when meeting a shark in the open waters—she has snapped her jaws in their direction. None of them stick around; animals have enough sense to recognize death when they see it.

But also like the ocean, Sea Sister is magical and beautiful, and you can’t get enough of her. Of the two options—spending time with a monster, or spending time with ghosts—you know which you’d rather choose.

Sometimes, she peers through the tendrils of her dark, water-logged hair, and you glimpse how others might see her: lurking, cruel, dangerous. A twisted and hungry creature. Sometimes, she will dance by spinning through the water in a whirl of gaunt limbs, a sight as terrifying as it is fascinating.

Then she smiles, dives, cavorts, and there is only Sea Sister again. Fierce and fiercely lonely, savage and savagely beautiful. She belongs only to you; the light that dazzles your eyes alone.

And you know with every filament of your being that these are the good days, the bright hours and best moments of your life, and that their like will never come again.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“Mami should know better; she does know better. A child of three is wise enough to steer clear from the embrace of ghosts, because the past is an endless ocean on which we can sail forever without returning home. And the past is the only place the dead can take you, the only thing a spirit offers: moments long gone, days turned to dust.

But her future is a cold, narrow place. Of course she wants to sail on that endless ocean of the past, wants to spend her days lost in re-creations of a place where she felt happy. Tomorrow holds less and less interest for your mother.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“Somewhere to the south of your tiny refuge, Hong Kong is currently surrendering to Japan this very afternoon. The history textbooks will refer to this day as Black Christmas.

Soon, troops will move in to establish martial law and subjugate the population. Soon, thousands of men will die in prisons and POW camps, while thousands of women will face rape and sexual slavery. Thousands more will starve because there is no food coming into the ports, while many will die screaming from torture.

I cannot help most of them, and my heart bleeds for this.

The darkest hours of your city are here, and they will last for three years, eight months. The legacy of pain they leave behind will last even longer. It is everything your parents feared would happen, and more.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces

“Hope is only the ghost of a promise; it has no substance, no weight.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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