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Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Madeleine Thien
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“The present is all we have, yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands.”
“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?”
“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?”
“Their great fear was not death, but the brevity of an insufficient life.”
“I wondered: what happens when a hundred thousand people memorize the same poem? Does anything change?”
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Book Keywords:
revolution, death, fathers-and-daughters, the-axiom-of-zero, time, word, hope, protest, jfc, self-help, independence, music, life, poetry, mindfulness, forgiveness, crying, presence, philosophy, zero, leitmotif-of-my-life