Ken Liu

Quotes by Ken Liu

• I thought my duty was to restore Haan, but Haan is not King Cosugi or the burned-down palace or the ruins of the great estates or the dead nobles and their descendants pining for glory-these are but parts of an experiment at a way of life for the people of Haan, her true essence. When the experiment has proven to be a failure, one must be willing to try new paths, new ways of doing things.

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• As the wind continued to howl and groan through her decaying body, she began to sing her story.

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• 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

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• I have seen the poor suffer when nobles seek the purity of ideals. I have seen the powerless die when princes believe in the nostalgia of their dreams. I have seen the common people torn from peace and thrown into war when kings yearn to test the clarity of their vision.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• Clearing away the superficial structure of the reigns of emperors and the dates of battles, there was the deeper rhythm of history's ebb and flow not as the deeds of great men, but as the lives lived by ordinary men and women wading through the currents of the natural world around them: its geology, its seasons, its climate and ecology, the abundance and scarcity of the raw material for life.

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• But it's not really Chinese, is it?'Logan was thoughtful for a moment. I don't know. I guess you'd say it's really not if you look back thousands of years. But I don't think that way. Lots of things start out not Chinese and end up that way.

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• 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.

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• But being the mirrors for each other's souls has a cost: by the time they part from each other, the individuals in the mating pair have become indistinguishable. Before their merger, they each yearned for the other; as they part, they part from the self. The very quality that attracted them to each other is also, inevitably, destroyed in their union.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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• We are not defined by our individual loneliness, but by the web of relationships in which we're enmeshed.

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• 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.

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• But it's not really Chinese, is it?'Logan was thoughtful for a moment. I don't know. I guess you'd say it's really not if you look back thousands of years. But I don't think that way. Lots of things start out not Chinese and end up that way.

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• 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.

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• We are not defined by our individual loneliness, but by the web of relationships in which we're enmeshed.

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• 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

  Read quote

• But being the mirrors for each other's souls has a cost: by the time they part from each other, the individuals in the mating pair have become indistinguishable. Before their merger, they each yearned for the other; as they part, they part from the self. The very quality that attracted them to each other is also, inevitably, destroyed in their union.

  Read quote