Music of the Ghosts Quotes

“Truth, she believed, lies in what is said as much as in what isn't, in the same way that a melody not only is a sequence of audible notes but encompasses the spaces and pauses in between. When listening to music, you must learn to take in even the atmosphere of an echo.”
― Vaddey Ratner, Music of the Ghosts

“The spirit of this land lives in its fields of rice, Its forest pathways, its flooded rivers, And in the rhythms that echo For the sojourners, already on our way . . .”
― Vaddey Ratner, Music of the Ghosts

“He has not turned to religion. Nor has he renewed his belief in camaraderie and brotherhood—the ideology of revolution. Rather the simple gift of clothes, made on the faith that what one gives to another will not be lost, led him to consider that the arbitrariness of birth and circumstance might be altered not through grand schemes of social engineering but through such minute selfless acts, the gestures of empathy we extend to one another in our daily encounters.”
― Vaddey Ratner, Music of the Ghosts

“He supposes in this way he's learned to pray not as one might to the gods but as one does by simply pausing every now and then to think of others.”
― Vaddey Ratner, Music of the Ghosts

“The United States bombed Indochina with three times the tonnage of bombs used in all of World War II; Cambodia alone was hit with three times more tonnage than Japan.”
― Vaddey Ratner, Music of the Ghosts