Top 50 Madeleine Thien Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I like to think of home as a verb, something we keep recreating.”

— Madeleine Thien

2. “The present is all we have, yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands.”

— Madeleine Thien

3. “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.”

— Madeleine Thien

4. “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.”

— Madeleine Thien

5. “One thing I have learned, dear Sparrow, is that light is never still and solid and so it is with love. Light can be split into many directions. Its nature is to break apart. My.”

— Madeleine Thien

6. “In the end, I believe these pages and the Book of Records return to the persistence of this desire: to know the times in which we are alive. To keep the record that must be kept and also, finally, to let it go.”

— Madeleine Thien

7. “I promise you that for all our life together, I will seek worlds that we might never have encountered in our singularity and our solitude. I will shelter our family. I will share your tears. I will bind my happiness to yours. Our country is about to be born. Let us, too, have the chance to begin again.”

— Madeleine Thien

8. “He remembered Bertolt Brecht: I would also like to be wise. In the old books it says what wisdom is: To shun the strife of the world and to live out Your brief time without fear All this I cannot do.”

— Madeleine Thien

9. “If some people say what is in their hearts and other people say what glides easily off the tongue, how can we talk to one another?”

— Madeleine Thien

10. “For all her talent, and for all of Kai’s, it was Sparrow, she knew, who had the truest gift. His music made her turn away from the never-possible and the almost-here, away from an unmade, untested future. The present, Sparrow seemed to say, is all we have, yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands.”

— Madeleine Thien

11. “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?”

— Madeleine Thien

12. “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.”

— Madeleine Thien

13. “I wondered: what happens when a hundred thousand people memorize the same poem? Does anything change?”

— Madeleine Thien

14. “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?”

— Madeleine Thien

15. “People aren’t made to float through the air. Unless we know the weight of our bodies, unless we feel the force of gravity, we’ll forget what we are, we’ll lose ourselves without even noticing.”

— Madeleine Thien

16. “She said the music made her wonder, Does it alter us more to be heard, or to hear?”

— Madeleine Thien

17. “If they want to come for you, they will come, and it doesn’t matter what you read or what you failed to read. The books on your shelves, the music you cherish, the past lives you’ve lived, all these details are just an excuse.”

— Madeleine Thien

18. “It was a time of chaos, of bombs and floods, when love songs streamed from the radios and wept down the streets. Music sustained weddings, births, rituals, work, marching, boredom, confrontation and death; music and stories, even in times like these, were a refuge, a passport, everywhere.”

— Madeleine Thien

19. “Don’t ever try to be only a single thing, an unbroken human being. If so many people love you, can you honestly be one thing?”

— Madeleine Thien

20. “And suddenly I was in the car with my father. I heard rain splashing up over the tires and my father, humming. He was so alive, so beloved, that the incomprehensibility of his suicide grieved me all over again. By then, my father had been dead for two decades, and such a pure memory of him had never come back to me.”

— Madeleine Thien

21. “But for anything to be alive, it required motion : the current must run, the record must turn, a person must leave or find another path. Without movement or change, the world became nothing more than a stale copy, and this was the trouble with Ba’s elegant calligraphy, his patient life, it was frozen in time.”

— Madeleine Thien

22. “Their great fear was not death, but the brevity of an insufficient life.”

— Madeleine Thien

23. “What must it feel like, I wondered, to begin again? Would I still be the same person if I woke up in a different language and another existence?”

— Madeleine Thien

24. “The young man murmured in his sleep and said, “Dear Sparrow,” and Sparrow felt, for the first time, how the purest joy could be a heaviness.”

— Madeleine Thien

25. “The concerto’s beauty was even more impassioned than he remembered, and also more piteous and quiet and restrained, and he clasped his hands together to absorb both the grief and joy in his body.”

— Madeleine Thien

26. “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?”

— Madeleine Thien

27. “It’s foolhardy to think that a story ends.”

— Madeleine Thien

28. “Tomorrow begins from another dawn, when we will be fast asleep.”

— Madeleine Thien

29. “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.”

— Madeleine Thien

30. “What mattered was the here and now and not the life before, what mattered were the changeable things of today and tomorrow and not the ever, infinitely, unbearably unchanging yesterday. She.”

— Madeleine Thien

31. “Without the musician, all life would be loneliness.”

— Madeleine Thien

32. “And yet throughout the world, past and present, for thousands of years, those whom we call good men, righteous men, have been accustomed to the sight of such things, have sat and looked and considered them to be matters of course, have not demanded justice for the victims or offered to help them. This is the most appalling, unjust, and unequal thing, the most inexplicable theory under heaven.”

— Madeleine Thien

33. “It’s only now, in hindsight, that I think she saw her own disappearance as a quality to be desired. That perhaps she needed, finally, to live unobserved.”

— Madeleine Thien

34. “Light from the tanks found him, as if they could collect all the irreconcilable parts of his life. No matter how many lights they shone, they could never take away the darkness. Daylight was blinding, but in the dark he still existed. What did they see, he wondered, his hands still open. Of all the people he had loved and who had loved him, of all the things that he had witnessed, lived and hoped for, of all the music he had created, how much was it possible to see?”

— Madeleine Thien

35. “She wanted to tell him that whatever happened, whatever they chose, one day they would have to come awake, everyone would have to stand up and confront themselves and realize that it wasn’t the Party that made them do it. One day, they would be alone with their actions.”

— Madeleine Thien

36. “Q: How do you tell an extroverted mathematician from an introverted one? A: An extroverted mathematician stares at your shoes when talking to you.”

— Madeleine Thien

37. “Was there anyone in this world who could taste something delicious-economic freedom and political reform-a taste that was salty and fattening and sweet and promising, and only be satisfied with one mouthful? Who would wait patiently for nearly a billion people to also have a taste? No, anyone would try to get a second mouthful, a third, a whole bowl for themselves.”

— Madeleine Thien

38. “I’ve got nothing to offer you kids but these noodles. They’re good noodles but they won’t change the world.”

— Madeleine Thien

39. “How does a copy become more than a copy? Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before.”

— Madeleine Thien

40. “I felt she saw into me, past every facade and flourish, and that the more she knew me, the more she loved me. I was too young, then, to know how lasting this kind of love is, how rarely it comes in one’s life, how difficult it is to accept oneself, let alone another.”

— Madeleine Thien

41. “But was a miracle still a miracle if it came too late?”

— Madeleine Thien

42. “But what was fortune? She had come to believe it was being exactly the same on the inside as on the outside. What was misfortune but the quality of existing as something, or someone else, inside?”

— Madeleine Thien

43. “Sound had a freedom that no thought could equal because a sound made no absolute claim on meaning. Any word, on the other hand, could be forced to signify its opposite.”

— Madeleine Thien

44. “I assumed,” Ai-ming told me, “that when Big Mother’s stories finished, life would continue and I would go back to being myself. But it wasn’t true. The stories got longer and longer, and I got smaller and smaller. When I told my grandmother this, she laughed her head off. She said, ‘But that’s how the world is, isn’t it? Or did you think you were bigger than the world?”

— Madeleine Thien

45. “Solitude can reshape your life. Like a river that gets cut off from the sea. You think it’s moving somewhere, but it’s not. You can drown inside yourself.”

— Madeleine Thien

46. “Look at you quivering like a bag of fresh tofu!”

— Madeleine Thien

47. “Kai, she thought, you are as lost as I am. You have no idea where this beauty comes from and you know better than to think that such clarity could come from your own heart. Maybe, like Sparrow, Kai was terrified that one day the sound would shut off.”

— Madeleine Thien

48. “Her mother, she thought, had all the attributes of the famous proverb: one who thrives in calamity but perishes in soft living.”

— Madeleine Thien

49. “What shook Ling the most was that she wasn’t even angry. Anger, too, could dissipate, but this emptiness that took its place might never be released.”

— Madeleine Thien

50. “After surgery, he told his doctors that the pain was exactly as it was, but he did not feel it as greatly. “It’s as if,” he had said, a cool blandness in his eyes, “the pain is not being done to me.” One day, maybe in a ten years, or fifty years, a surgeon will be able to do this with disturbing precision, destroy a whirlpool of memory, an entire system of feelings, but in the meantime it’s like taking a hatchet to a spider’s web.”

— Madeleine Thien