Best Of Madeleine Thien's "Do Not Say We Have Nothing"

Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien.

Painting above: Digging Trees in the Garden (c. 1908) by Zinaida Serebriakova

Ai-ming told me that solitude can reshape your life. "Like a river that gets cut off from the sea," she said. "You think its moving somewhere, but it's not. You can drown inside yourself. That's how I feel."

p.50

She told me I possessed what every great mathematician required, an excellent memory and a sense of poetry.

p.52

Her sister was the great love of her life. When their husbands had disappeared into the war, she and Swirl had survived together, and Big Mother  had never let her sister down.

p.95

Her mother's grey shirt and pants were ironed and clean, proper and unassuming, but there was a look in her mother's eyes that had nothing to do with propriety and obedience. There was no resignation, only a sharp knife in a pool of water. Her mother, she thought, had all the attributes of the famous proverb: one who thrives in calamity but perishes in soft living.

p. 130-131

In villages like mine, individuals pass away, but generations and routines cycle on forever.

p.156

[...] and Sparrow felt, for the first time, how the purest joy could be a heaviness.

p.171

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.

p.175

"I'm sure you know that, without obsession, there is no life's work. But where does this attentiveness come from? Have you asked yourself? Surely it's what we each carry, in greater and greater quantities as we age, remembrance."

p.302-303

There had been a time in Ai-ming's life when her father's quiet had seemed like another person in their midst. Quiet was alive, like a toy you could just keep hitting.

p.329

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.

p.331

Many lives and many selves might exist, but that doesn't render each variation false.

p.419

Sometimes people's lives fold back together, sometimes all they need is a meeting place, good fortune, faith.

p.453-454

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

p.458