Do Not Say We Have Nothing Quotes

“The only life that matters is in your mind. The only truth is the one that lives invisibly, that waits even after you close the book. Silence, too, is a kind of music. Silence will last.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“If you're trapped in a room, and nobody is coming to save you, what can you do? You have to bang on the walls and break the windows. You have to climb out and save yourself. It's obvious, Li-ling, that crying doesn't help a person live.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“He'd been thinking about the quality of sunshine, that is, how daylight wipes away the stars and the planets, making them invisible to human eyes. If one needed the darkness in order to see the heavens, might daylight be a form of blindness? Could it be that sound was also a form of deafness? If so, what was silence?”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Sometimes, I think, you can look at a person and know they are full of words. Maybe the words are withheld due to pain or privacy, or maybe subterfuge. Maybe there are knife-edged words waiting to draw blood.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“I know that throughout my life I have struggled to forgive my father. Now, as I get older, I wish most of all that he had been able to find a way to forgive himself.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“The present is all we have, yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Their great fear was not death, but the brevity of an insufficient life.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“What was a zero anyway? A zero signified nothing, all it did was tell you nothing about nothing. Still, wasn't zero also something meaningful, a number in and of itself? In jianpu notation, zero indicated a caesura, a pause or rest of indeterminate length. Did time that went uncounted, unrecorded, still qualify as time? If zero was both everything and nothing, did an empty life have exactly the same weight as a full life? Was zero like the desert, both finite and infinite?”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“What happened if you melted a person down layer by layer? What if there was nothing between the layers, and nothing at the centre, only quiet?”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“I wondered: what happens when a hundred thousand people memorize the same poem? Does anything change?”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“She wanted to tell him that whatever happened, whatever they chose, one day they would have to come awake, everyone would have to stand up and confront themselves and realize that it wasn’t the Party that made them do it. One day, they would be alone with their actions.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“She said the music made her wonder, Does it alter us more to be heard, or to hear?”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“I assumed,” Ai-ming told me, “that when Big Mother’s stories finished, life would continue and I would go back to being myself. But it wasn’t true. The stories got longer and longer, and I got smaller and smaller. When I told my grandmother this, she laughed her head off. She said, ‘But that’s how the world is, isn’t it? Or did you think you were bigger than the world?”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“The things you experience are written on your cells as memories and patterns, which are reprinted again on the next generation. And even if you never lift a shovel or plant a cabbage, every day of your life something is written upon you. And when you die, the entirety of that written record returns to the earth. All we have on this earth, all we are, is a record. Maybe the only things that persist are not the evildoers and demons (though, admittedly, they do have a certain longevity) but copies of things. The original has long since passed away from this universe, but on and on we copy.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“I promise you that for all our life together, I will seek worlds that we might never have encountered in our singularity and our solitude. I will shelter our family. I will share your tears. I will bind my happiness to yours. Our country is about to be born. Let us, too, have the chance to begin again.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Solitude can reshape your life. Like a river that gets cut off from the sea. You think it’s moving somewhere, but it’s not. You can drown inside yourself.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Was there anyone in this world who could taste something delicious-economic freedom and political reform-a taste that was salty and fattening and sweet and promising, and only be satisfied with one mouthful? Who would wait patiently for nearly a billion people to also have a taste? No, anyone would try to get a second mouthful, a third, a whole bowl for themselves.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“But for anything to be alive, it required motion : the current must run, the record must turn, a person must leave or find another path. Without movement or change, the world became nothing more than a stale copy, and this was the trouble with Ba's elegant calligraphy, his patient life, it was frozen in time.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Light from the tanks found him, as if they could collect all the irreconcilable parts of his life. No matter how many lights they shone, they could never take away the darkness. Daylight was blinding, but in the dark he still existed. What did they see, he wondered, his hands still open. Of all the people he had loved and who had loved him, of all the things that he had witnessed, lived and hoped for, of all the music he had created, how much was it possible to see?”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“It’s only now, in hindsight, that I think she saw her own disappearance as a quality to be desired. That perhaps she needed, finally, to live unobserved.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“In English, consciousness and unconsciousness are part of a vertical plane, so that we wake up ↑ and we fall ↓ asleep and we sink ↓ into a coma. Chinese uses the horizontal line, so that to wake is to cross a border towards consciousness → and to faint is to go back ← . Meanwhile, time itself is vertical so that last year is “the year above” ↑ and next year is “the year below” ↓. The day before yesterday is the day “in front” ↑ and the day after tomorrow is the day “behind” ↓. This means that future generations are not the generations ahead, but the ones behind. Therefore, to look into the future one must turn around...”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“How does a copy become more than a copy? Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“If some people say what is in their hearts and other people say what glides easily off the tongue, how can we talk to one another?”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“One thing I have learned, dear Sparrow, is that light is never still and solid and so it is with love. Light can be split into many directions. Its nature is to break apart. My”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“It's foolhardy to think that a story ends”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Don't ever try to be only a single thing, an unbroken human being. If so many people love you, can you honestly be one thing?”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Without the musician, all life would be loneliness.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“In the end, I believe these pages and the Book of Records return to the persistence of this desire: to know the times in which we are alive. To keep the record that must be kept and also, finally, to let it go.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“The concerto's beauty was even more impassioned than he remembered, and also more piteous and quiet and restrained, and he clasped his hands together to absorb both the grief and joy in his body.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing