The Girl with a Thousand Faces Quotes

“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 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“A woman lurks beneath the ocean surface.

Skin the colour of pale jade, delicate as a paper lantern. Eyes dark and glistening, no whites. Clouds of black hair unspool around her head. She sweeps away errant, floating strands with hands that are long as your foot, the bones strangely elongated. Each finger is tipped with claw-like nails. In her mouth is the hardness of teeth, too many for a human and jagged as a shark’s. Her feet are long and flat like a pair of fins, with webbed toes.

Far from land, nearly drowned, bleeding still; inches away from a monster. You should be screaming. You should be a gibbering mess. Instead, you are only amazed.

Even… awestruck.

For she is beautiful, in a twisted way, and something about her sorrowful, ferocious expression moves you to a mix of pity and wonder.”
― 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

“When you think about your mother in the years to come, you prefer to remember her in those moments, standing by the harbor’s edge in the failing light, eating cheap street-food and rattling off ghost stories in her flat, matter-of-fact way. Her callused hands smelt of hospital soap, and she would shift the weight back and forth from her sore feet.

Occasionally, I look back and wonder how your lives might have unfolded, if given enough time and peace. Whether you and Mami might have built something stronger, if brutal war and long toil had ever eased its grip.

I still wonder that now.”
― 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

“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