Top 140 Ken Liu Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “That feeling in your heart: it’s called mono no aware. It is a sense of the transience of all things in life. The sun, the dandelion, the cicada, the Hammer, and all of us: we are all subject to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell, and we are all ephemeral patterns destined to eventually fade, whether in a second or an eon.”

— Ken Liu

2. “Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.”

— Ken Liu

3. “The truth is not delicate and it does not suffer from denial – the truth only dies when true stories are untold.”

— Ken Liu

4. “Sometimes you must do the right thing even if it hurts you. Actions reify ideals. We must never stop striving to do good, to protect the weak and the powerless. This is the charge to all men of learning.”

— Ken Liu

5. “Pretending that the fake is real only makes the real seem fake.”

— Ken Liu

6. “Safety is an illusion, as is faith without temptation.”

— Ken Liu

7. “You can’t tell how high a kite can fly without being willing to let all the string out.”

— Ken Liu

8. “He was like a seed still tethered to the withered flower, just waiting for the dead air of the late summer evening to break, for the storm to begin.”

— Ken Liu

9. “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

10. “History is the long shadow cast by the past upon the future. Shadows, by nature, lack details.”

— Ken Liu

11. “It is not so much how well the dog dances, she thought, but that a dog is dancing at all.”

— Ken Liu

12. “It is like a gentle kitten is licking the inside of my heart.”

— Ken Liu

13. “You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It’s for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone.”

— Ken Liu

14. “There are many ways to say I love you in this cold, dark, silent universe, as many as the twinkling stars.”

— Ken Liu

15. “Parents fear to be forgotten, to not be understood by their children.”

— Ken Liu

16. “Old friends are like old clothes: they fit the best.”

— Ken Liu

17. “Miss Lilly.” Mr. Kan stood up and solemnly shook her hand. “When there is such a large gap of years between two friends, we Chinese call it wang nien chih chiao, a friendship that forgets the years. It’s destiny that brings us together. I hope you will always think of me and Teddy as your friends.”

— Ken Liu

18. “Time’s arrow is the loss of fidelity in compression. A sketch, not a photograph. A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original.”

— Ken Liu

19. “Science fiction is the literature of dreams, and texts concerning dreams always say something about the dreamer, the dream interpreter, and the audience.”

— Ken Liu

20. “We are not defined by our individual loneliness, but by the web of relationships in which we’re enmeshed.”

— Ken Liu

21. “The grace of kings is not the same as the morals governing individuals.”

— Ken Liu

22. “I can tell you a secret about life: once you realize how insignificant the individual is in the vastness of space-time, you can face anything.”

— Ken Liu

23. “There are no monsters. The monster is us.”

— Ken Liu

24. “Sir, a reformed man is worth ten men virtuous from birth, for he understands temptation and will strive the harder to not stray.”

— Ken Liu

25. “Overly literal translations, far from being faithful, actually distort meaning by obscuring sense.”

— Ken Liu

26. “Individual stones are not heroes, but all the stones together are heroic.”

— Ken Liu

27. “The emperor is just a man, after all.”

— Ken Liu

28. “The animals will stop moving when I stop breathing. But if I write to you with all my heart, I’ll leave a little of myself behind on this paper, in these words. Then, if you think of me on Qingming, when the spirits of the departed are allowed to visit their families, you’ll make the parts of myself I leave behind come alive too. The creatures I made for you will again leap and run and pounce, and maybe you’ll get to see these words then.”

— Ken Liu

29. “A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original.”

— Ken Liu

30. “If you insist on fighting every fight that comes your way, you’re simply letting them push you around in a different way.”

— Ken Liu

31. “Safety is an illusion, as is faith without temptation. We’re imperfect, unlike the gods, but in that imperfection we may yet make them jealous.”

— Ken Liu

32. “As the wind continued to howl and groan through her decaying body, she began to sing her story.”

— Ken Liu

33. “There are no heroes, Tian Haoli. Grand Secretary Shi was both courageous and cowardly, capable and foolish. Wang Xiuchu was both an opportunistic survivor and a man of greatness of spirit. I’m mostly selfish and vain, but sometimes even I surprise myself. We’re all just ordinary men – well, I’m an ordinary demon – faced with extraordinary choices. In those moments, sometimes heroic ideals demand that we become their avatars.”

— Ken Liu

34. “The act of remembering is an act of retracing, and by doing so we erase and change the stencil.”

— Ken Liu

35. “But the real attraction of such technology has never been about capturing reality. Photography, videography, holography... the progression of such “reality-capturing” technology has been a proliferation of ways to lie about reality, to shape and distort it, to manipulate and fantasize. People shape and stage the experiences of their lives for the camera, go on vacations with one eye glued to the video camera. The desire to freeze reality is about avoiding reality.”

— Ken Liu

36. “Pockets of sentience glow in the cold, deep void of the universe like bubbles in a vast, dark sea.”

— Ken Liu

37. “Read a lot of books and try a lot of recipes,” Jia said. “When you learn enough about the world, even a blade of grass can be a weapon.”

— Ken Liu

38. “But being the mirrors for each other’s souls has a cost: by the time they part from each other, the individuals in the mating pair have become indistinguishable. Before their merger, they each yearned for the other; as they part, they part from the self. The very quality that attracted them to each other is also, inevitably, destroyed in their union.”

— Ken Liu

39. “We have children because we can’t remember our own first taste of ambrosia.” I can’t.”

— Ken Liu

40. “There is no definitive census of all the intelligent species in the universe. Not only are there perennial arguments about what qualifies as intelligence, but each moment and everywhere, civilizations rise and fall, much as the stars are born and die. Time devours all. Yet every species has its unique way of passing on its wisdom through the ages, its way of making thoughts visible, tangible, frozen for a moment like a bulwark against the irresistible tide of time. Everyone makes books.”

— Ken Liu

41. “We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves – they’re the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling, accidental universe tolerable.”

— Ken Liu

42. “Nostalgia is a wound that we refuse time to heal.”

— Ken Liu

43. “For a moment, as I listened to her, I felt as if I could step through the distance between us and hear an echo of the world through her ears, see the stars through her eyes: an austere clarity that made my heart leap.”

— Ken Liu

44. “Words and actions must be read under the guiding light of intent.”

— Ken Liu

45. “A little self-doubt is a good thing,” said Jia, “but not excessive doubt. Sometimes we live up to the stories others tell about us.”

— Ken Liu

46. “It is in the face of disasters that we show our strength as a people. Understand that we are not defined by our individual loneliness, but by the web of relationships in which we’re enmeshed.”

— Ken Liu

47. “I’m mostly selfish and vain, but sometimes even I surprise myself. We’re all just ordinary men – well, I’m an ordinary demon – faced with extraordinary choices. In those moments, sometimes heroic ideals demand that we become their avatars.”

— Ken Liu

48. “A lord who knows how to wield men is ten times more fearsome than one who knows only how to wield a sword.”

— Ken Liu

49. “We suffer because we are the grass upon which giants tread.”

— Ken Liu

50. “At the end of all rationality, there is simply the need to decide and the faith to live through, to endure. Ruth.”

— Ken Liu