Ken Liu Quotes

Without you having to do anything, the phone brackets the shot so that you can pretend to time travel, to pick the perfect instant when everyone is smiling. Skin is smoothed out; pores and small imperfections are erased. What used to take my father a day's work is now done in the blink of an eye, and far better.

Do the people who take these photos believe them to be reality? Or have the digital paintings taken the place of reality in their memory? When they try to remember the captured moment, do they recall what they saw, or what the camera crafted for them?

Emperor, king, general, duke," he whispered to himself. "These are just labels. Climb up the family tree of any of them high enough and you'll find a commoner who dared to take a chance.

Old friends are like old clothes: they fit the best.

The Allatians believe that they have a writing system superior to all others. Unlike books written in alphabets, syllabaries, or logograms, an Allatian book captures not only words, but also the writer's tone, voice, inflection, emphasis, intonation, rhythm. It is simultaneously a score and a recording. A speech sounds like a speech, a lament a lament, and a story re-creates perfectly the teller's breathless excitement. For the Allatians, reading is literally hearing the voice of the past.

But there is a cost to the beauty of the Allatian book. Because the act of reading requires physical contact with the soft, malleable surface, each time a text is read, it is also damaged and some aspects of the original irretrievably lost. Copies made of more durable materials inevitably fail to capture all the subtleties of the writer's voice, and are thus shunned.

In order to preserve their literary heritage, the Allatians have to lock away their most precious manuscripts in forbidding libraries where few are granted access. Ironically, the most important and beautiful works of Allatian writers are rarely read, but are known only through interpretations made by scribes who attempt to reconstruct the original in new books after hearing the source read at special ceremonies.

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.

We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves - they're the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling, accidental universe tolerable.

The animals will stop moving when I stop breathing. But if I write to you with all my heart, I'll leave a little of myself behind on this paper, in these words. Then, if you think of me on Qingming, when the spirits of the departed are allowed to visit their families, you'll make the parts of myself I leave behind come alive too. The creatures I made for you will again leap and run and pounce, and maybe you'll get to see these words then.

He had truly meant to pay her a compliment when he told her how different she was from "those silly young noblewomen," had truly believed that she would be flattered to be thought extraordinary from her sex. It was men like him who had made her into a symbol, had put her into this impossible position. But, in a way, that made the task easy. She knew exactly what she needed to say and do, and she even enjoyed the challenge of playing the role of his ideal: She was worthy only insofar as she oriented herself to men, like a sunflower adoring the sun.

fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors - which is the logic of narratives in general - over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.

All life is an experiment.

All life is an experiment.'" "A

Mazoti said nothing. It always seemed that no matter how hard a woman worked, a man could eclipse her with no effort. "Gin,

Taking away men's weapons will be not bring peace. They'll fight with sticks and stones, and tooth and nail. Mapidéré's is a peace supported only by fear, as secure as a nest built on a rotten branch.

The agony of the dead is with us, and we hear their screams and walk among their ghosts. We cannot avert our eyes or plug up our ears. We must bear witness and speak for those who cannot speak. We have only one chance to get it right.

You will have sacrificed the lives of the people for personal honor, an empty word," Luan said. "That seems to me a most selfish act.

It's hard to hear the music behind the words when their meanings get in the way," she told me once.

Even a brilliant mind sometimes needs a dull stone to sharpen itself.

There was a tendency by some to romanticize love, to make a fetish out of it. The poets made love seem like a bar of iron coming out of the furnace at the blacksmith's, red hot and staying so forever. Soto did not think much of such notions.

There is no definitive census of all the intelligent species in the universe. Not only are there perennial arguments about what qualifies as intelligence, but each moment and everywhere, civilizations rise and fall, much as the stars are born and die. Time devours all. Yet every species has its unique way of passing on its wisdom through the ages, its way of making thoughts visible, tangible, frozen for a moment like a bulwark against the irresistible tide of time. Everyone makes books.

Your Highness, do not use the word 'envy' so casually when you do not know the paths others have trod on. Few women - no, few people - have the advantages you possess. If you lament that you cannot live as you like, perhaps it is because you have not tried to live as yourself at all.

The silence of the victims of the past imposes a duty on the present to recover their voices, and we are most free when we willingly take up that duty.

As the moon rose, I saw the light illuminate an ancient quote from the Ano Classics, carved into one of the broken lintels: 'All life is an experiment.

Time's arrow is the loss of fidelity in compression. A sketch, not a photograph. A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original.

There is often no line between perfection and evil.

But in a time of war, knowledge made interesting friendships. Soon, the scholars and the thieves were . . . well, thick as thieves.

A bird needs both long and short feathers to fly," said Jia. "You need to learn to work with different kinds of people." Kuni nodded, glad of Jia's wisdom.

I would like a window seat," I said, imagining the stars streaming by.

I don't pay much attention to the distinction between fantasy and science fiction–or between "genre" and "mainstream" for that matter. For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors-which is the logic of narratives in general–over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.

We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves–they're the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling accidental universe tolerable. That we call such a tendency "the narrative fallacy" doesn't mean it doesn't also touch upon some aspect of the truth.

Some stories simply literalize their metaphors a bit more explicitly.

History is the long shadow cast by the past upon the future. Shadows, by nature, lack details.

The way my father saw it, whether the Manchus on the mainland or the Japanese were in charge didn't much matter, since they all left us alone except when it came time for taxes.

...reading is literally hearing the voice of the past.

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

When it comes to politics, it's best to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
That's a philosophy a lot of my monkeys used to share, said the Monkey King. But I disagree with it.

The old man's two sons had fought and died for the hegemon in his endless wars. The old man was sick of talk of valor and honor, of glory and courage. He just wanted his sons back, strong boys who had worked hard in the fields. Boys who did not understand why they had to die, only that someone told them it was sweet and fitting to do so.

The act of remembering is an act of retracing, and by doing so we erase and change the stencil.

What is so bad about being compared to women?" Kuni said. "Half the world is made of women.

Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves obscure our truths.

This was a game popular among nobles and commoners alike. A category would be chosen - animals, plants, books, furniture - and everyone took turns comparing himself to an object from the chosen category. If the others judged the comparison apt, they would drink. If not, the player who made the comparison would drink.

There is a time for flight, and a time for descent; a time for movement, and a time for rest; a time to do, and a time to prepare." "This

He would measure the world against the rigid grid of his heart and put each man in charge of a domain no more and no less than his just deserts.

The heart is a complicated thing, and we're capable of many loves, though we're told that we must value one to the exclusion of others...You can be loyal to your husband at the same time that you take a lover for your own sake, though the poets tell us this is wrong. But why should we believe that the poets understand us better than we do ourselves?

Love, or the lack of it, is not within my domains of expertise.

A great warrior trusts not his weapons, but himself. When you possess true strength, you can deal a killing blow even if all you have is a blade of grass. "Now

Do you see how much power you have when you act without fear?

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

Now that's the sort of thing I wish the nobles said more often," Dafiro whispered to Ratho. "While they resolve all their disputes this way, the rest of us can go back to planting our harvests and enjoying our lives. Let the kings and dukes get in an arena and fight all their wars with their own two hands. We'll watch and cheer them on.

The way I look at it is this: If you try to obey the law, and the judges call you a criminal anyway, then you might as well live up to the name.

Those men and women of Yangzhou died a hundred years ago, Tian Haoli, and nothing can be done to change that. But the past lives on in the form of memories, and those in power are always going to want to erase and silence the past, to bury the ghosts. Now that you know about the past, you're no longer an innocent bystander. If you do not act you are complicit with the Emperor and his Blood Drops in this new act of violence, this deed of erasure. Like Wang Xiuchu, you're now a witness. Like him, you must choose what to do. You must decide if, on the day you die, you will regret your choice.

We have children because we can't remember our own first taste of ambrosia." I can't

Getting a title is easy. It's keeping it that's hard.

Labeling someone a monster implies that he is from another world, one which has nothing to do with us. It cuts off the bonds of affection and fear, assures us of our own superiority, but there's nothing learned, nothing gained. It's simple, but it's cowardly.

There are many ways to say I love you in this cold, dark, silent universe, as many as the twinkling stars.

As Kuni repeatedly kissed Jia, he whispered into her ear, "I'm so sorry for everything you've suffered. I know you don't think I understand, but I do. I've chewed on bitter herbs every morning so that I can feel a fraction of what you felt, alone, frightened, surrounded by enemies and trying to raise two children." Jia,

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

She may be from the sky, yet she is not so strange after all.

Though we were not born on the same day of the same month of the same year, we ask that Fate give us the satisfaction of dying on the same second of the same minute of the same hour.

The calf is capable of walking quite well now," Dazu said. "He never stumbles."

"But I told you to carry him back here," the teacher said. "The first thing a soldier must learn is to obey orders."

Every day, the calf grew a little heavier, and every day, Dazu had to struggle a little harder. He would collapse, exhausted, when he finally got to the ranch, and the calf would bound out of his arms, glad to be able to walk on his own and stretch out.

When winter rolled around again, Médo handed him a wooden sword and asked him to strike as hard as he could at the practice dummy. Dazu looked with distaste at the crude weapon with no edge, but he swung obediently.

The wooden dummy fell in half, cut clean through. He looked at the sword in his hand with wonder.

"It's not the sword," his teacher said. "Have you looked at yourself lately?" He brought Dazu to stand in front of a brightly polished shield.

The young man could hardly recognize the reflection. His shoulders filled the frame of the mirror. His arms and thighs were twice as thick as he remembered, and his chest bulged over his narrow waist.

"A great warrior trusts not his weapons, but himself. When you possess true strength, you can deal a killing blow even if all you have is a blade of grass.

"Now you're finally ready to learn from me. But first, go thank the calf for making you strong.

He intrigued her. Powerful men, in her experience, were usually not so full of doubt. Kuni was consumed by the desire to do good for others, but uncertain what "good" might be and whether he was the right man for the job.
Kuni was the sort of man, Risana realized, who, rather than deceive himself, was so full of self-doubt that he could not longer see himself

Mono no aware, my son, is an empathy with the universe.

If you insist on fighting every fight that comes your way, you're simply letting them push you around in a different way.

At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potential in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper.

At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high-precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random mutations; upside-down images are formed against two screens made up of millions of light-sensitive cells, which translate light into electrical pulses that go up the optic nerves, cross the chiasm, down the optic tracts, and into the visual cortex, where the pulses are reassembled into letters, punctuation marks, words, sentences, vehicles, tenors, thoughts.

The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional.

Maybe Soto was right. It was silly to make a fetish out of love, and not to accept that love was like food, and each dish had its own flavor. The heart surely had room for more than one.

Read a lot of books and try a lot of recipes," Jia said. "When you learn enough about the world, even a blade of grass can be a weapon.

It cannot be defeated: Just when a gardener thinks he has won and eradicated it from his lawn, a rain would bring the yellow florets right back. Yet it's never arrogant: Its color and fragrance never overwhelm those of another. Immensely practical, its leaves are delicious and medicinal, while its roots loosen hard soils, so that it acts as a pioneer for other more delicate flowers. But best of all, it's a flower that lives in the soil but dreams of the skies. When its seeds take to the wind, it will go farther and see more than any pampered rose, tulip, or marigold.

It's one of the central paradoxes of archaeology that in order to excavate a site so as to study it, we must consume it and destroy it in that process.

she likes the sound of languages other than English.

Surveillance is surveillance. I can never understand why some people think it matters whether it's the government doing it to you or a company.

Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.

When I became a bandit, I spent a lot of time being close to the lowliest of the low: criminals, the enslaved, deserters, men who had nothing to lose. Contrary to what I had expected, I found that they had a hardscrabble beauty and grace. They were not mean in their nature, but made mean by the meanness of their rulers. The poor were willing to endure much, but the emperor had taken everything from them.

These men have simple dreams: a plot of land, a few possessions, a warm house, conversations with friends, and a happy wife and healthy children. They remember the smallest acts of kindness and think me a good man because of a few exaggerated stories. They've raised me on their shoulders and called me duke, and I have a duty to help them get a little closer to their dreams.

There are no heroes, Tian Haoli. Grand Secretary Shi was both courageous and cowardly, capable and foolish. Wang Xiuchu was both an opportunistic survivor and a man of greatness of spirit. I'm mostly selfish and vain, but sometimes even I surprise myself. We're all just ordinary men - well, I'm an ordinary demon - faced with extraordinary choices. In those moments, sometimes heroic ideals demand that we become their avatars.

Pockets of sentience glow in the cold, deep void of the universe like bubbles in a vast, dark sea.

That feeling in your heart: it's called mono no aware. It is a sense of the transience of all things in life. The sun, the dandelion, the cicada, the Hammer, and all of us: we are all subject to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell, and we are all ephemeral patterns destined to eventually fade, whether in a second or an eon.

Everyone marched as fast or slow as he liked.

Platitude or not, the crowd erupted into applause, and by acclamation, Kuni Garu became the Duke of Zudi. A few pointed out that titles of nobility really couldn't be handed out in such a democratic fashion, but these killjoys were ignored.

My goal is to act as a faithful interpreter, preserving as much of the original's nuances of meaning as possible without embellishment or omission. Yet a translator must also balance fidelity to the source, aptness of expression, and beauty of style. The best translations into English do not, in fact, read as if they were originally written in English. The English words are arranged in such a way that the reader sees a glimpse of another culture's patterns of thinking, hears an echo of another language's rhythms and cadences, and feels a tremor of another people's gestures and movements.

Overly literal translations, far from being faithful, actually distort meaning by obscuring sense.

When I was younger," Kikomi said, "I would get into debates with my brothers and their friends. They could seldom win, for their minds were dull, and they did not apply themselves to their work. But often, when it was clear that I had the better argument, they would laugh and say 'It's impossible to argue with such a pretty girl,' and thereby deny me my victory. Life has not changed much since then.

Dad and I went on walking, our shadows touching.

Individual stones are not heroes, but all the stones together are heroic.

Great men and women are not constrained in the forms their loves may take," said Soto. "You and Jia may love others, but in each other's estimation, you'll always be first among equals."

"But it will never be smooth sailing and all sunshine, will it?"

"What would be the fun in that?

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.

The fact that we can never have complete, perfect knowledge does not absolve us of the moral duty to judge and to take a stand against evil.

A little self-doubt is a good thing," said Jia, "but not excessive doubt. Sometimes we live up to the stories others tell about us.

We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others' lives.

She imagined Kuni and Risana together, and despite herself, she was consumed with fury.

A momentary smile appeared on Cogo's face before fading away. No matter how many times he saw it, he was still amazed by how Kuni's sincerity shaded into an instinct for political theater. He was, of course, moved by the loyalty of a man who would rather be in jail than betray him, but he also knew to play it for all it was worth to cement even more loyalty.

Every moment, as we walk on this earth, we are watched and judged by the eyes of the universe.

Who can say if the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thoughts I had in my mind as I typed them? We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe.

And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly.

Does that thought not make the universe seem just a bit kinder, a bit brighter, a bit warmer and more human?

We live for such miracles.

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.

You can't tell how high a kite can fly without being willing to let all the string out.

The universe is full of echoes and shadows, the afterimages and last words of dead civilizations that have lost the struggle against entropy. Fading ripples in the cosmic background radiation, it is doubtful if most, or any, of these messages will ever be deciphered. Likewise, most of our thoughts and memories are destined to fade, to disappear, to be consumed by the very act of choosing and living. That is not a cause for sorrow, sweetheart. It is the fate of every species to disappear into the void that is the heat death of the universe. But long before then, the thoughts of any intelligent species worthy of the name will become as grand as the universe itself.

If someone had informed him that men were dying every day in the Islands for lack of a cup of rice, he would have been surprised. "Why do they insist on eating rice? Meat is so much better!

He wanted to say that he yearned to accomplish something extraordinary, to be admired like a man riding at the head of a great procession.

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.

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.

So let us no more think of being compared to women as an insult." It

Politics were for those who had too much to eat.

A knife is not malicious merely because it is sharp, and a plot is not evil merely because it is effective. All depends on the wielder. The grace of kings is not the same as the morals governing individuals.

It's easy for men to be friends as close as brothers when they're poor and struggling, but much harder when things are going well. Friends are never as close as blood. Remember that, Rat.

The character for 'mob' is formed from the character for 'nobility' on one side and the character for 'sheep' on the other. So that's what a mob is, a herd of sheep that turns into a pack of wolves because they believe themselves to be serving a noble cause.