Top 60 Tan Twan Eng Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The mind forgets, but the heart will always remember. And what is the heart’s memory but love itself?”

— Tan Twan Eng

2. “For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.”

— Tan Twan Eng

3. “The palest ink will endure beyond the memories of man.”

— Tan Twan Eng

4. “Yggdrasil is the Tree of Life,’ he says. ‘Its branches cover the world and stretch up to the sky. But it has only three roots. One is submerged in the waters of the Pool of Knowledge. Another in fire. The last root is being devoured by a terrible creature. When two of its roots have been consumed by fire and beast, the tree will fall, and eternal darkness will spread across the world.”

— Tan Twan Eng

5. “Memories I had locked away have begun to break free, like shards of ice fracturing off an arctic shelf. In sleep, these broken floes drift toward the morning light of remembrance.”

— Tan Twan Eng

6. “A raintree bent towards a window in one side of the bungalow, eavesdropping on the conversations that had taken place inside over years.”

— Tan Twan Eng

7. “To have memories, happy or sorrowful, is a blessing, for it shows we have lived our lives without reservation.”

— Tan Twan Eng

8. “Accept that there are things in this world we can never explain and life will be understandable. That is the irony of life. It is also the beauty of it.”

— Tan Twan Eng

9. “Yes, I could say that I had lived my life, if not to the full then at least almost to the brim. What more could one ask? Rare is the person whose life overflows.”

— Tan Twan Eng

10. “He stopped, pausing to arrange his words like an ikebana expert with his flowers, shifting, bending, adding, and taking away to achieve the results he desired.”

— Tan Twan Eng

11. “Never meet a person’s anger directly. Deflect, distract him, even agree with him. Unbalance his mind, and you can lead him anywhere you want.”

— Tan Twan Eng

12. “Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?”

— Tan Twan Eng

13. “I have lived, I have traveled the world, and now, like a worn-out clock, my life is winding down, the hands slowing, stepping out of the flow of time. If one steps out of time what does one have? Why, the past of course, gradually being worn away by the years as a pebble halted on a riverbed is eroded by the passage of water.”

— Tan Twan Eng

14. “The world goes by, the young and the hopeful, all head for their future. Where does that leave us? There is a misconception that we have reached our destinations the moment we grow old, but it is not a well-accepted fact that we are still travelling towards those destinations, still beyond our reach even on the day we close our eyes for the final time.”

— Tan Twan Eng

15. “I will dance to the music of words, for one more time.”

— Tan Twan Eng

16. “Before me lies a voyage of a million miles, and my memory is the moonlight I will borrow to illuminate my way.”

— Tan Twan Eng

17. “When the First Man and First Woman were banished from their home, Time was also set loose upon the world.”

— Tan Twan Eng

18. “Complete surrender, but not total abandonment of awareness.”

— Tan Twan Eng

19. “I can only teach you the way, that is all. What you do with it and what it does to you, those are beyond my influence.”

— Tan Twan Eng

20. “The young have hopes and dreams, while the old hold the remains of them in their hands and wonder what has happened to their lives.”

— Tan Twan Eng

21. “One question remained to me. “If a higher level of bujutsu involves fighting with the mind, what then is the very highest level?” He closed his eyes for a while, seeing things he would never show me. “That,” he said, “would be never to fight at all.”

— Tan Twan Eng

22. “I am certain it has never been easy, growing up as a child of mixed parentage in this place. But that is your strength. Accept the fact that you are different, that you are of two worlds. And I wish you to remember this when you feel you cannot go on: you are used to the duality of life. You have the ability to bring all of life’s disparate elements into a cohesive whole. So use it.”

— Tan Twan Eng

23. “I had thought my room was bad enough, but there were even more books in Kon’s.”

— Tan Twan Eng

24. “Time is eating away my memory. Time, and this illness, this trespasser in my brain.”

— Tan Twan Eng

25. “Moments in time when the world is changing bring out the best and the worst in people.”

— Tan Twan Eng

26. “When you are lost, in this world or on the continent of time itself, remember who you have been and you will know who you are. These people were all you, and you are them. I was you before you were born and you will be me after I am gone. That is the meaning of family.” He.”

— Tan Twan Eng

27. “I have become a collapsing star, pulling everything around it, even the light, into an ever-expanding void.”

— Tan Twan Eng

28. “Die while I can still remember who I am, who I used to be.”

— Tan Twan Eng

29. “I was you before you were born and you will be me after I am gone. That is the meaning of family.”

— Tan Twan Eng

30. “It begins to rain softly, raising goose-pimples on the pond’s skin.”

— Tan Twan Eng

31. “Enlightenment, it is a moment of complete clarity, of pure bliss. At that instant everything will be revealed to you.”

— Tan Twan Eng

32. “Duty is a concept created by emperors and generals to deceive us into performing their will. Be wary when duty speaks, for it often masks the voice of others.”

— Tan Twan Eng

33. “What made it worse was that we could never truly share such burdens with even those closest to us. In the end, the mistakes were our own, the consequences to be borne by us alone.”

— Tan Twan Eng

34. “The practice of designing gardens had originated in the temples of China, where the work was done by monks. Gardens were created to approximate the idea of a paradise in the afterlife.”

— Tan Twan Eng

35. “Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again.”

— Tan Twan Eng

36. “I realize that there are fragments of my life that I do not want to lose, if only because I still have not found the knot to tie them up with.”

— Tan Twan Eng

37. “In return for surrendering to the throw, you are given the gift of flight,’ he said.”

— Tan Twan Eng

38. “I once read something about Borges,” I say. “He was blind and very old, spending his last days in Geneva. He told someone, ‘I don’t want to die in a language I cannot understand.’” I laugh bitterly. “That is what will happen to me.”

— Tan Twan Eng

39. “As though to fortify me she took the letter out and placed it on the table between us. Its pages were folded, yellowed like old skin, the faint tattoo of aged ink that had seeped onto the blank side visible to me. Just like me, I thought, looking at the letter. The life I had lived was folded, only a blank page exposed to the world, emptiness wrapped round the days of my life; faint traces of it could be discerned, but only if you looked closely, very closely.”

— Tan Twan Eng

40. “Feel your body expanding as you breathe: that is where we live, in the moments between each inhalation and exhalation.”

— Tan Twan Eng

41. “The noise of insects sizzled in the air, like fat in a smoking wok.”

— Tan Twan Eng

42. “I had loaded another weight onto his suffering and it hurt me to understand that while one person can never really share the pain of another, they can so easily and so heedlessly add to it.”

— Tan Twan Eng

43. “My memory is like the moon tonight, full and bright, so bright you can see all its scars.”

— Tan Twan Eng

44. “Je kunt de seizoenen zien als stukjes van de mooiste, transparantste zijde in verschillende kleuren. Los van elkaar zijn ze mooi, maar leg de een boven op de ander, al zijn het alleen maar de randen, en er komt iets speciaals tot stand. Dat geldt ook voor de smalle strook tijd waarin het begin van het ene seizoen het eind van een ander overlapt.”

— Tan Twan Eng

45. “The entire structure seems to be melting, losing the memory of its shape.”

— Tan Twan Eng

46. “Anger and sorrow walked with me, joining hands with guilt, the three walls of my prison.”

— Tan Twan Eng

47. “Spirit expanded, mind unfurling open, heart in flight.”

— Tan Twan Eng

48. “And what was time but merely a wind that never stopped?”

— Tan Twan Eng

49. “That night, side by side, we drifted among the galaxies of sea-stars, while far, far above us the asterisks of light marked out the footnotes on the page of eternity.”

— Tan Twan Eng

50. “Teacher, as he was called, looked tiny, childlike, and deceptively vulnerable.”

— Tan Twan Eng