Top 140 Ken Liu Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “It was all such high-minded nonsense, chicken soup photographed in a studio to be peddled as wisdom. The art was always better than the explanation of the art.”

— Ken Liu

102. “There’s always a second act. Always.”

— Ken Liu

103. “One has to be careful, whenever one tells a story about a great injustice. We are a species that loves narrative, but has been taught not to trust an individual speaker.”

— Ken Liu

104. “He wept then, knowing that he would not remember this moment in the future, feeling both the weight of freedom and the lift of oblivion.”

— Ken Liu

105. “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

106. “If I say ‘love,’ I feel here.” She pointed to her lips. “If I say ‘ai,’ I feel here.” She put her hand over her heart.”

— Ken Liu

107. “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

108. “The soul had to be pretty close to the body; otherwise the body would die.”

— Ken Liu

109. “For the God Civilization, the first sign of her senescence was the extreme lengthening of each individual member’s life span. By then, each individual in the God Civilization could expect a life as long as four thousand Earth years. By age two thousand, their thoughts had completely ossified, losing all creativity. Because individuals like these held the reins of power, new life had a hard time emerging and growing. That was when our civilization became old.”

— Ken Liu

110. “A bird needs both long and short feathers to fly,” said Jia. “You need to learn to work with different kinds of people.”

— Ken Liu

111. “Time flows like a river, halting for no one. There’s nothing in this world that can outlast time itself.”

— Ken Liu

112. “In an extraordinary time, he faced extraordinary choices, and maybe some would say this means we cannot judge him. But how can we really judge anyone except in the most extraordinary of circumstances? It’s easy to be civilized and display a patina of orderliness in calm times, but your true character only emerges in darkness and under great pressure.”

— Ken Liu

113. “Perhaps it is the dream of every parent to keep their child in that brief period between helpless dependence and separate selfhood when the parent is seen as perfect, faultless. It is a dream of control and mastery disguised as love, the dream that Lear had about Cordelia.”

— Ken Liu

114. “We’re born into one family, but then we must build another for ourselves. As my big sister used to say, we’re always the heroes of our own stories.”

— Ken Liu

115. “Glad to see your brain hasn’t been entirely rotted by books.”

— Ken Liu

116. “True courage is to insist on seeing when all around you is darkness.”

— Ken Liu

117. “You can’t tell how high a kite can fly without being willing to let all the string out. Trust is often better than jealousy as a path to loyalty.”

— Ken Liu

118. “We’re all trying to tell our own story, And we make other people parts of our own stories. We’re meant to bring our stories together, to speak and listen and know that the stories are real and they matter.”

— Ken Liu

119. “She took out her candle, put it in the candleholder I made for her, and lit it at both ends. When she lit her soul like that she was her most beautiful. Her face glowed. Her pale skin was lit form within like a Chinese paper lantern about to burst into flame.”

— Ken Liu

120. “Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly. Does the thought not make the universe seem just a bit kinder, a bit brighter, a bit warmer and more human? We live for such miracles.”

— Ken Liu

121. “The friendship of kings is like the promise of a drunkard,” said the beggar.”

— Ken Liu

122. “I’ve been wandering around the streets of New York all day. I can’t keep her savage beauty out of my mind. I wish my soul was heavier, more solid, something that could weigh itself down. I wish my soul wasn’t this feather, this ugly wisp of goose down in my pocket, lifted up and buffeted about by the wind around her flame. I feel like a moth.”

— Ken Liu

123. “Often, he felt as though he were sitting alone in the middle of a theater while the same performance was put on every night around him, with different actors saying the same lines in various settings.”

— Ken Liu

124. “Not every mind learns the same way. A knife needs to be sharpened against stone, but a pearl needs to be polished with soft cloth.”

— Ken Liu

125. “Every night, when you stand outside and gaze upon the stars, you are bathing in time as well as light.”

— Ken Liu

126. “You speak of destiny, yet what is destiny but accumulated chance made into a story in retrospect?”

— Ken Liu

127. “The stories we love the most aren’t stories about who we are, but who we could become.”

— Ken Liu

128. “I have seen the poor suffer when nobles seek the purity of ideals. I have seen the powerless die when princes believe in the nostalgia of their dreams. I have seen the common people torn from peace and thrown into war when kings yearn to test the clarity of their vision.”

— Ken Liu

129. “The only duty any child owes to her parent is to live a life that is true to her nature.”

— Ken Liu

130. “Sometimes those who lit the spark that began a conflagration must be consumed by it lest the fire burn on indefinitely.”

— Ken Liu

131. “What courage it took for the starving and the poor to continue the mere act of existence, of survival, of endurance. Such quiet acts of heroism were not celebrated, and yet they made up the foundation of civilization, far more than all the honorable sentiments of the Ano sages and the pretty words of the nobles.”

— Ken Liu

132. “What Dara needs now is not the Doubt-Ender, but the emptiness of doubtful potential. When the heart has been cleansed by doubt, every hope becomes a possibility. I want to tell a story that the people don’t expect, a story of empathy that encompasses the world.”

— Ken Liu

133. “True courage comes not from being certain and unafraid, but from doing what must be done even while being terrified and full of doubts.”

— Ken Liu

134. “But Mata understood that Jizu had been made into something like a saint, a symbol around which people could rally. Such symbols were the most dangerous because they could be made to say whatever those who held the symbol wished.”

— Ken Liu

135. “Everyone is a storyteller,” he said. “That’s how we make sense of this life we live. Misfortune and affliction test us with one blow after another, most of which we don’t deserve. We have to tell ourselves a story about why to make all the random manipulations of fate and fortune bearable.”

— Ken Liu

136. “The best followers are those who think it was their own idea to follow you.”

— Ken Liu

137. “If one abandons all ideals, then the world will be without substance.”

— Ken Liu

138. “I’m coming home, my beloved, center of my heart.”

— Ken Liu

139. “Getting a title is easy. It’s keeping it that’s hard.”

— Ken Liu

140. “A loyal servant does not think of things outside of his control.”

— Ken Liu

141. “A poet marshals the words and phrases and stanzas for the purpose of moving the listener’s heart; an engineer marshals components and devices and effects for the purpose of changing the world.”

— Ken Liu

142. “Do not let others tell you what you should do or want. Our lives are brief flash storms in the eternal scrublands of Time, and we honor all creation by living lustfully and passionately. Shame is a lie told to you by those who would enslave you rather than free you.”

— Ken Liu

143. “Though Kuni had once been a gambler, he had already accomplished much. And achievement had a way of lowering a man’s tolerance for risk.”

— Ken Liu

144. “There was little logic to the men’s reasoning, but sometimes logic was not as important as belief.”

— Ken Liu

145. “A man’s circumstances are not determined by his talents, Crupo thought, but by where he chooses to put his talents to work.”

— Ken Liu

146. “There is far more happiness in a life that is your own than a life in which you are handed the lines to say and shown the gestures to make. Do not ever be ambitious.”

— Ken Liu

147. “Like all true stories, it was a mix of legends and facts, of myths imagined and deeds done, of the heart of darkness and the crown of light, of experiences borne and gaps filled, of things seen and visions that could only be authenticated by the mind’s eye.”

— Ken Liu