Sunbirth Quotes

“I couldn't see how it was possible to live comfortably while loving somebody else. Where does one find the courage to face the possibility of such a loss? Sometimes, I didn't know whether there really was a difference between love and dependence.”
― An Yu, Sunbirth

“Like a hole, the more we probe into death, the deeper and emptier it becomes.”
― An Yu, Sunbirth

“I couldn't understand why I had to be protected, why the youngest must always be the child, and why all the people around me believed in the illusion that it was a privilege to live without knowledge. I couldn't see how ignorance could ever be the safest state of existence.”
― An Yu, Sunbirth

“Anyone who spent twelve years under a fading sun had better accept it as part of the natural course of things. People had to live, after all, and life was already a large enough mess, even before the sun started to disappear.”
― An Yu, Sunbirth

“As people grow up, childhood becomes foggy, but no matter who you ask, they always remember the weather. They forget the locations of their schools, the names of their best friends, the colours of their houses, but never the weather. Perhaps it is the tactility of air touching skin that makes it impossible to forget. We remember it with our bones, our muscles, our skin. So even though I had been living with the cold for over half of my life, if I just closed my eyes, I could still feel the full sun blazing over Five Poems Lake.”
― An Yu, Sunbirth

“Grief is a running tap, a closed cabinet, chopsticks touching bowls, teeth chewing. I’d never imagined that would be the case. I hadn’t expected it to slip into everything.”
― An Yu, Sunbirth

“I’d imagined that the day he lost his memory was the real moment that death came for him, but as I watched the sun disappear over the years, I began to wonder whether this erasure was, in fact, a form of death for all of us. Who are we if not just a collection of memories locked in a container made of flesh and blood? If we ceased to exist in the memory of those closest to us, then how could we assume that we were as alive as we’d been before? It made me realise that, despite what people said about it, death was not so straightforward after all.”
― An Yu, Sunbirth

“In a way, I thought, our bodies are just containers. I’d always assumed that we have the capacity to absorb the world, to endlessly store everything that we come across. But as we sat there in silence, I began to question whether there were, in fact, things that could overflow from us. Is that what the Beacons were: people who had become too full?”
― An Yu, Sunbirth