Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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