The Astonishing Color of After Quotes

“There's no point in wishing. We can't change anything about the past. We can only remember. We can only move forward.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“Once you figure out what matters, you'll figure out how to be brave.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“Memory is a mean thing, slicing at you from the harshest angles, dipping your consciousness into the wrong colors again and again. A moment of humiliation, or devastation, or absolute rage, to be rewound and replayed, spinning a thread that wraps around the brain, knotting itself into something of a noose. It won't exactly kill you, but it makes you feel the squeeze of every horrible moment. How do you stop it? How do you work the mind free?”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“Once upon a time we were the standard colors of a rainbow, cheery and certain of ourselves. At some point, we all began to stumble into the in-betweens, the murky colors made dark and complicated by resentment and quiet anger.  At some point, my mother slid so off track she sank into hues of gray, a world drawn only in shadows.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“We're not lost. We're just headed somewhere different.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“The purpose of memory is to remind us how to live.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“Believing is a type of magic. It can make something true.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“Hold your finger to the sky with so much force it lengthens like a spine. Look up to the point of it and beyond. There. That tiny patch of the world, no bigger than the tip of your finger. At first glance, it might look like one flat color. Blue, or gray, or maybe even orange.

But it's much more complex than that. Squint. See the daubs of lilac. The streak of sage no wider than a hyphen. That butterscotch smear and the faint wash of carnelian. All of them coming together to swirl at the point just above your finger.

Breathe them in. Let them settle in your lungs. Those are the colors of right now.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“It’s okay to be afraid. But not okay if be afraid means you do nothing. You must not do nothing. That’s not life worth living.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“Here is my mother, with wings instead of hands, and feathers instead of hair. Here is my mother, the reddest of brilliant reds, the color of my love and my fear, all of my fiercest feelings trailing after her in the sky like the tail of a comet.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“Did my mother ever get to see a cicada molting? Did she wish that she could do exact that? Shed her skin and be someone new? There were days when she seemed to transform into something quieter, darker. Her colors deeper but also muted. Both her truer self, and not. Or maybe it wasn't a transformation. Maybe it was a momentary reveal. A peeling back of the protective layers. A sharpening of a pencil, bringing the tip to its most focused point.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“Everything fades. Everything in the physical world, like paper and furniture, but also things in the mind. Memories, emotions. Life. Friendships. Those fade, too. It’s just a matter of time.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“Children know the truth," says Feng, her voice going very quiet.
I turn to look at her. "What? What do you mean?"
"They haven't learned to walk around with a veil over their eyes. That's a habit that come with adulthood. Kids always know what they see. That's why ghosts can't hide from them.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“We kissed, and I was every color in the world, alight.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“My mother's dying soaked down through the carpet, through the wood. When it was done with the bedroom, it took over our house, and then it moved on to me. It soaked through my hair and skin and bone, through my skull and deep into my brain. Now it's staining everything, leaking the blackest black into the rest of the world.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“You love who you love. There's no changing that.”
― Emily X. R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“最難風雨故人來 [...] it’s an incredible blessing to be able to see your loved ones during the most difficult times.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“Colors flash like promises and black flickers like static, like memories, and everything is falling, falling, remembering, falling, remembering, the two words synonymous.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“Memories tell a story, if you look hard enough. Because the purpose of memory, I would argue, it to remind us how to live" -Leigh”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“What is memory? It's not something you can physically hold, or see, or smell, or taste. It's just nerve impulses jumping between neurons. Sometimes it's a matter of choice. Other times it's self-preservation, or protection" -Leight”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“Here, in two dimensions, they looked so happy. But then, didn’t everyone, in pictures? That was almost the point, wasn’t it? To be able to look back and see yourself smiling, even if the camera had shuttered and clicked while you were standing there thinking about all the things that were wrong?”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“Pain has an element of blank; It cannot recollect When it began, or if there were A day when it was not.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“Maybe that's where all the other colours are hiding - in a dimenson of the world we just can't see, between our sky and the rest of the universe.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“If he looked in my eyes straight on, he would know how he’d pierced me with an arrow, how its shaft was still sticking out of my chest, twitching each time my heart contracted. And maybe he’d see how my mother had sliced up everything else.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“She was a sea creature and the music was her ocean.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“We try so hard to make these little time capsules. Memories strung up just so, like holiday lights, casting the perfect glow in the perfect tones. But that picking and choosing what to look at, what to put on display—that’s not the true nature of remembering.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“The more I think about it, the more that believing seems like the ultimate definition of family.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“I listen to the clock striking out each determined tick. If only I could rewind, go back in time and ask my mother every question about every tiny thing. How crucial those little fragments are now; how great their absence. I should have saved them up, gathering them like drops of water in a desert. I'd always counted on having an oasis.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“Pretend you're a kid again and you don't even know what's good. Just try for the sake of trying. For the sake of having fun.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“What would I give for a remote control with a button to slow down time, or even rewind a little bit?”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After