Top 50 Emily X.R. Pan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Believing is a type of magic. It can make something true.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

3. “Once you figure out what matters, you’ll figure out how to be brave.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

4. “The mother-shaped hole became a cutout of the blackest black. Something I could only see around. If I tried to look directly at it, I saw emptiness.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

5. “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

6. “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

7. “We’re not lost. We’re just headed somewhere different.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

8. “I think people see ghosts all the time, ” says Feng. “And I think ghosts want to be seen. They want to be reassured that they truly exist. They back into this world after passing through the gates of death into another dimension, and suddenly they hear every thought, speak every language, understand things they didn’t get when they were alive.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

9. “Once upon a time we’d been an almost perfect family. I wish we could rewind, go back to live in those years forever.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “The purpose of memory is to remind us how to live.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

19. “She was a sea creature and the music was her ocean.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

20. “I guess the universe has a way of knocking supposed-tos right on their asses.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

21. “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

22. “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

23. “I wish I could command my brain, say to it: Here. Go ahead. Unspool, and let the memories go. Let them be gone.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

24. “We kissed, and I was every color in the world, alight.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

25. “Some terrible requirement of being a teenager is being absolutely awful when your parents are being lovely.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

26. “I tried to swallow again, but my throat was dry enough to be splintered apart and used for kindling.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

27. “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

28. “Each piece was a snow globe of emotion and instinct. And the music – that was another language entirely.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

29. “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

30. “Before me lay a body grayer than a sketch. Someone had applied makeup and colors to try to make it look alive. I didn’t cry. That was not my mother. My mother is free in the sky. She doesn’t have the burden of a human body, is not made up of a single dot of gray. My mother is a bird.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

31. “Purple confusion clouds my mind.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

32. “I’ll do all the things I constantly forgot to, all the things I wish I could go back and add in like another layer on a watercolour painting.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

33. “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

34. “Funny how when you can’t sleep the brain turns itself inside out, becomes a desperate and hungering thing. All I want right now is to fall headfirst into the blackest black.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

35. “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

36. “The more I think about it, the more that believing seems like the ultimate definition of family.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

37. “A baby bouncing over a knee above a familiar leather sofa. Across the room, deft hands mapping out black and white keys. A living room bursting with magenta warmth and dandelion cheer and all the hues of love, invisible but undeniably there.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

38. “What makes a person – one who is so deeply loved – decide to do such a thing?”

— Emily X.R. Pan

39. “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

40. “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

41. “Because the purpose of memory, I would argue, is to remind us how to live.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

42. “Back at home, sometimes people say I look exotic or foreign. Sometimes they even mean it as a compliment. I guess they don’t hear how that makes it sound like I’m some animal on display at the zoo.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

43. “Sisters are very lucky... They get to be best friends. Even in the afterlife, I think they recognize the presence of the other better than anyone else.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

44. “If Axel were there with me, he probably would’ve squeezed my shoulder and asked, What color? And I would’ve had to explain that I was colorless, translucent. I was a jellyfish caught up in a tide, forced to go wherever the ocean willed. I was as unreal as my mother’s nonexistent note.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

45. “It’s nobody’s fault. But is that even true? It’s only human nature to look for a place to lay the blame. Our fingers are more than ready to do the pointing it’s like we’re all blindfolded and spinning.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

46. “She was a sea creature and the music was her ocean. It had always belonged to her. It was in her every breath, her every movement. She was the color of home.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

47. “Whose fault was it? That’s the question on everyone’s mind, isn’t it? Nobody will ever say it out loud. It’s a question people would call inappropriate. The kind of thing where everyone tells you, “It’s nobody’s fault.” But is that even true? It’s only human nature to look for a place to lay the blame. Our fingers are more than ready to do the pointing, but it’s like we’re all blindfolded and spinning. What makes a person want to die?”

— Emily X.R. Pan

48. “His boy smells wafted over; the sweetness of his deodorant, the smoky floral of some other product, and, beneath all that, a scent like the quiet grass at night.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

49. “There was something disturbing about seeing her in that loneliness-induced sleep.”

— Emily X.R. Pan

50. “The clung to me as I dug through my bag of the keys to the house, it was a warm rain, and it looked gray as it came down from the sky. I imagined it to be liquid armor, shaping itself to my body where it made contact. Shielding me from everything.”

— Emily X.R. Pan