The Hidden Girl and Other Stories Quotes

“The act of remembering is an act of retracing, and by doing so we erase and change the stencil.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“Sometimes I wonder if we have misunderstood the notion of freedom. We prize freedom to more than freedom from . People must be free to own guns, so the only solution is to teach children to hide in closets and wear ballistic backpacks. People must be free to post and say what they like, so the only solution is to tell their targets to put on armour.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“As the author, I construct an artifact out of words, but the words are meaningless until they're animated by the consciousness of the reader. The story is co-told by the author and the reader, and every story is incomplete until a reader comes along and interprets it.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“A good story cannot function like a legal brief, which attempts to persuade and lead the reader down a narrow path suspended above the abyss of unreason. Rather, it must be more like an empty house, an open garden, a deserted beach by the ocean. The reader moves in with their own burdensome baggage and long-cherished possessions, seeds of doubt and shears of understanding, maps of human nature and baskets of sustaining faith. The reader then inhabits the story, explores its nooks and crannies, rearranges the furniture to suit their taste, covers the walls with sketches of their inner life, and thereby makes the story their home.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“Nostalgia is a wound that we refuse time to heal.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“Without you having to do anything, the phone brackets the shot so that you can pretend to time travel, to pick the perfect instant when everyone is smiling. Skin is smoothed out; pores and small imperfections are erased. What used to take my father a day's work is now done in the blink of an eye, and far better.

Do the people who take these photos believe them to be reality? Or have the digital paintings taken the place of reality in their memory? When they try to remember the captured moment, do they recall what they saw, or what the camera crafted for them?”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“The images she had seen went through her mind again and again. Sometimes understanding comes to you not through thought, but through this throbbing of the heart, this tenderness in the chest that hurts.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“Sometimes understanding comes to you not through thought, but through this throbbing of the heart, this tenderness in the chest that hurts.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“I am not my father,” she said. “And you’re not your parents. Family is a story that is told to you, but the story that matters the most you must tell yourself.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“I want to pick a boy to marry—I’m thinking someone who is kind and has soft hands, maybe someone who grinds mirrors for a living so that he will know that there is another dimension beyond the smooth surface.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“I want to hone my talent so that it shines brightly, terrorizing the unjust and lighting the way for those who would make the world better. I will protect the innocent and guard the timid. I do not know if I will always do what is right, but I am the Hidden Girl, and my loyalty is to the tranquillity yearned by all.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“Pictures are important," I'd tell them. "Our brains are so flawed, leaky sieves of time. Without pictures, so many things we want to remember would be forgotten.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“Parents fear to be forgotten, to not be understood by their children.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“It is not so much how well the dog dances, she thought, but that a dog is dancing at all.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“Everyone is a troll now. If you’ve ever liked or shared a meme that wished violence on someone you’d never met, if you’ve ever decided it was okay to snarl and snark with venom because the target was “powerful,” if you’ve ever tried to signal your virtue by piling on in an outrage mob, if you’ve ever wrung your hands and expressed concern that perhaps the money raised for some victim should have gone to some other less “privileged” victim—then I hate to break it to you, you’ve also been trolling.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“Her voice faded behind him as he swam through the stars and stripes, fractal, ambiguous, tasting of salty hope and the deliberate sting of leaving behind the past.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“We're all thieves in this world of suffering," the nun says. "Honor and faith are not virtues, only excuses for stealing more.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“What's the point of studying dead computer languages, anyway?" Ona said ..... "We study classical languages to acquire the habits of mind of the ancients," Ms. Coron said. "You must know where you came from." ..... Ona knew she should shut up, but-just like the recursive calls in Ms. Coron's diagram had to return up the call stack- she couldn't keep down Loudmouth Ona. "I know where I came from: I was designed on a computer, grown in a vat, and raised in the glass nursery with the air from outside pumped in.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“America is only a democracy for those lucky enough to be Americans. To everybody else, it's just a dictator with the biggest bombs and missiles.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“The new defensive neural networks—marketed as “armor”—observe each user’s emotional state in response to their content stream. Capable of operating in vectors encompassing text, audio, video, and AR/VR, the armor teaches itself to recognize content especially upsetting to the user and screened it out, leaving only a tranquil void.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“Over three thousand robots work under the supervision of three nurses to take care of the needs of some three hundred residents in Sunset Homes. This is how we die now. Out of sight.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“There is more than enough to occupy our curiosity and restless need for novelty if we but turn our gaze to the ten square meters around us: the unique longitudinal patterns in each tile beneath our feet, the chemical symphony animating each bacterium on our skin, the mysteries of how we can contemplate ourselves contemplating ourselves.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“Sometimes I wonder if we have misunderstood the notion of freedom. We prize “freedom to” so much more than “freedom from.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“but to forget is a far greater sin than to remember too well.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“Nix v. Hedden,”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“Ava, we’re thinking of calling it a day.” The speaker was Shaw, Ava’s little brother. Still showing a bit of baby fat in his cheeks, the young man tried to furrow his brows to show his seriousness. Behind him, his friends were already packing up their tools and finding-buckets”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“Ms. Coron went on, “A recursive function works like nesting dolls. To solve a bigger problem, a recursive function calls on itself to solve a smaller version of the same problem.” Ona wished she could call on a smaller version of herself to solve her problems. She imagined that nested inside her was Obedient Ona, who enjoyed diagramming Classical Computer Languages and studying prosody in Archaic English.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“So much talent,” she says; then, after a pause, “Wasted.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“You may think width, depth, and height are the only dimensions of the world, Hidden Girl, but you’d be wrong. You have lived your life as an ant on a sheet of paper, and the truth is far more wondrous.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

“I got to see less of you than most mothers, but also more.”
― Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories