The Paper Menagerie And Other Stories Quotes
"Every act of communication is a miracle of translation."
"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?"
"The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional."
"To search for what matters to you, we must know all about you."
"There's no shame in being entranced by the beauty and wiles of a hulijing."
"It's easy to be cynical. But I'm proud of what we've done."
"A man can fall in love with a hulijing just like he can with any human woman."
"In the face of the inevitable, the only choice is to adapt."
"A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask." - Susan Sontag
"Magic words are often misunderstood. When those girls and you all thought ‘gook’ was a magic word, it held a kind of power. But it was an empty magic based on ignorance."
"The Chinese invented writing as an aid to divination, so Chinese characters always had a deep magic to them."
"He has made a great deal of money in a way that seems like an American fairy tale: Lone inventor comes up with an idea that brings joy to the world, and the world rewards him deservedly."
"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."
"My father proclaims that he works in the business of capturing reality, of stopping time and preserving memory. But the real attraction of such technology has never been about capturing reality."
"People shape and stage the experiences of their lives for the camera, go on vacations with one eye glued to the video camera."
"The desire to freeze reality is about avoiding reality."
"Conversations between us after that day were civil, careful performances that avoided straying anywhere near intimacy."
"It’s because the green from the leaves on the trees drips down with the spring rain."
"It’s because of chlorophyll in the grass. The chlorophyll has rings in it that absorb all colors of light except green."
"She was perfect in the way that little daughters are always perfect in the eyes of their fathers."
"A man’s life is not defined by one thing. He loves me. And he loves you."
"Whatever I remember of my mother, it’s all real."
"It is the way a simulacrum replicates the essence of the subject that makes it so compelling."
"Men have always underestimated her at the beginning of a fight, and she has to take advantage of it."
"The universe has shrunken down to the wavering spot at the end of the barrel of the gun."
"We’re all living on a boat, sweetheart. Earth is just a big raft in the sea of stars."
"I’ve never seen this picture. Dad described it: Mom was sitting in a chair, her side to the camera, wearing a tight green silk cheongsam."
"What kind of woman puts herself into a catalog so that she can be bought?"
"All parents make choices for their children. Almost always they think it’s for the best."
"It’s no more unfair than you and I deciding whether we want to be immortal," João had said.
"At the end of all rationality, there is simply the need to decide and the faith to live through, to endure."
"The universe is full of echoes and shadows, the afterimages and last words of dead civilizations that have lost the struggle against entropy."
"You know some very strange stories, Gran-Gran," six-year-old Sara said.
"What’s your name?" "I don’t have a name in the sense you think of it. But why don’t you call me Athena?"
"You’re made of metal. Who’s to say trees wouldn’t do just as well?"
"This is one that survived. Twisted, mangled, retold to fit what strangers want to hear, there is nonetheless some truth left in it."
"In the beginning the world was void and without light, and the spirits lived in the darkness."
"But Man was not content to wait every night. One night, Man invented fire to have his own sun, heat and light that obeyed his will, and that divided him from the animals that night and forever after."
"So Man was always yearning for the light, the light that gives him life and the light to which he will return."
"Patterns of energy now, Maggie and the others learned to coalesce, stretch, shimmer, and radiate."
"She was all alone. There was no one to converse with her, no one to share all this beauty."
"The world is shaped like the kanji for 'umbrella,' only written so poorly, like my handwriting, that all the parts are out of proportion."
"The light from the sun pushes against the sail, propelling us on an ever widening, ever accelerating, spiraling orbit away from it."
"It is in the face of disasters that we show our strength as a people. Understand that we are not defined by our individual loneliness, but by the web of relationships in which we're enmeshed."
"A person must rise above his selfish needs so that all of us can live in harmony."
"We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others' lives."
"I wish Dad were around so that I could ask him: How do you say 'I miss you' in a way that is appropriate to the occasion of your twenty-fifth birthday, as the last survivor of your race?"
"Everything passes, Hiroto. It is a sense of the transience of all things in life."
"Flavors until then unknown filled her mouth."
"Everyone is a stranger with a tale of his own."
"The world seemed then made afresh to her, full of tomorrows and undiscovered delights."
"I’ll need men like you there, men who have proven their bravery, integrity, and dedication to the cause."
"The lot of the Hoklo peasant was to toil and suffer in silence."
"Politics were for those who had too much to eat."
"The way my father saw it, whether the Manchus on the mainland or the Japanese were in charge didn’t much matter."
"We must become as brothers to each other."
"The brilliant Emperor Hirohito seized the opportunity and suggested to President Herbert Hoover his vision of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel as the solution to the worldwide economic crisis."
"The work was hard and dangerous. Every day men were injured and sometimes killed."
"It was best not to think too much about what we were doing, about the miles of water over our heads."
"Some men did go crazy under those conditions and had to be restrained before they could hurt themselves or others."
"America has knit together two oceans," the Emperor supposedly said. "Now let us chain together two continents."
"The Tunnel is, without a doubt, the greatest engineering project ever conceived by Man."
"The extraordinary engineering demands of the Tunnel thus drove many technological advances."
"In America, the Negroes and whites are separated: where they live, where they work, where they go to school."
"The law says that whites and Negroes can ride the bus together, but the secret of America is that law is not followed by large swaths of the country."
"It is the obsession of Americans to speak, to express opinions on things that they are ignorant about."
"The prisoners were brought into the Tunnel to take the place of regular work crews."
"When a prisoner was discovered to have expired from the work, his body was released from the shackles and a soldier would shoot it a few times."
"We had to make sure that the water did not get into the main Tunnel, even if the repair crews we sent in failed."
"I lifted a heavy rock near me and smashed it down on the hands of the man grabbing onto the opening."
"Everywhere in Yangzhou, the survivors were cremating bodies."
"The smell of rotting bodies could be detected a hundred li away."
"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."
"The silence of the victims of the past imposes a duty on the present to recover their voices."
"The past is not dead. It is with us. Everywhere we walk, we are bombarded by fields of Bohm-Kirino particles that will let us see the past like looking through a window."
"We cannot avert our eyes or plug up our ears. We must bear witness and speak for those who cannot speak."
"Every moment, as we walk on this earth, we are watched and judged by the eyes of the universe."
"History has always been difficult because of the delicacy of the truth, and denialists have always been able to resort to labeling the truth as fiction."
"The truth is not delicate and it does not suffer from denial—the truth only dies when true stories are untold."
"You can no more leave behind your past than you can leave behind your skin."
"We are born into strong currents of history, and it is our lot to swim or sink, not to complain about our luck."