Tash Aw > Quotes

“Man is a restless creature, nomadic at heart.”
― Tash Aw, Map of the Invisible World

“Time — how it expands to fill the spaces you create; how it makes meagre experiences seem never-ending. Whenever he heard people talk about the ravages of time, about how it robbed and deprived, Justin always smiled; because for him, time was an accomplice, plugging the gaps and fleshing out morsels of memory so he would have something substantial to hang on to. That way, however little he had seen or felt, he would always feel as if he had more: a life far richer than the truth.”
― Tash Aw, Five Star Billionaire

“It's impossible to find happiness if you're an orphan."
"That's not true. Orphans are the only ones who are free to find their own happiness; they don't have their own history so they create it for themselves."
"But, Z, that's just an illusion. Their lives are determined for them by people who have no relation to them whatsoever -- total strangers dictate their future. They have no attachment to anything, they stumble around in the dark until one day something happens to set them on a different, random path. I don't call that freedom."
"But that's just what it's like for all of us!”
― Tash Aw, Map of the Invisible World

“about “closure” and how worthless it was—why was it that everyone these days needed resolution, why couldn’t they just accept that life was messy, that it never ended neatly?”
― Tash Aw, Five Star Billionaire

“...a small piece of silk. It was at once iridescent and delicate, and shone with a colour no Occidental could ever have conceived....I held it in my hands, allowing it to cascade from my fingers. It was shot through with so many strands of colour that every time it moved its appearance changed: moonlight, emeralds and pearls all passed through my hands. This cold chameleon so transformed itself that I could scarcely believe it was the same piece of cloth.”
― Tash Aw, The Harmony Silk Factory

“Although harmony with nature is of considerable importance in planning a garden, it must never be allowed to obscure what lies at the heart of the design;the salvation of the human spirit. In creating a garden, we acquire, by force, a patch of land from the jungle; we mould it so that it becomes an oasis amid the wilderness. It is an endless struggle. Turn our backs for a moment and the darkness of the forest begins its insidious invasion of our tiny haven. The plants that we insert -- artificially, it must be noted, for no garden is a work of Mother Nature -- must not only provide shelter for the soul, they must be able to absorb and then disperse the creeping darkness of the jungle around us. The decorations do not merely adorn, they protect. They create a place where, at the end of our lives, we may find peace.”
― Tash Aw, The Harmony Silk Factory

“every second of the day offers a beautiful opportunity to achieve success. Therefore, you have 86,400 chances to change your life every day.”
― Tash Aw, Five Star Billionaire

“...my limbs became leaden, my head light as yarn on a weaver's spindle. My vision dazzled with the colours of richly shot silk; above me the sky was a tentative white canopy.”
― Tash Aw, The Harmony Silk Factory

“A marriage could not be happy if the husband was prettier than the wife, that much she knew.”
― Tash Aw, The Harmony Silk Factory

“...he returned to his barricaded silence, locking me out of his world. The unfathomable, inscrutable East, I thought. I was cut adrift from the shores of understanding. The sea spread itself before me, leading to a blank, blank horizon.”
― Tash Aw, The Harmony Silk Factory

“You must appreciate that time is always against you. It is never kind or encouraging. It gnaws away invisibly at all good things. Therefore, if you have any desire to accomplish anything, even the simplest task, do it swiftly and with great purpose, or time will drag it away from you.”
― Tash Aw, Five Star Billionaire

“The gorgeous breathlessness and thrilling pulse -- those are sensations that the years have layered on top of the initial emptiness, like sheet after sheet of silk covering a bare table. More than fifty years later I can only see the cloth; the table has been obscured.”
― Tash Aw, The Harmony Silk Factory

“Outlines of dead logs I hauled away remained impressed on the damp earth, scarring the ground with their funereal shapes.”
― Tash Aw, The Harmony Silk Factory

“What were you doing when you were eight, thirteen, fifteen, and eighteen? The answer is, I suspect: not very much.”
― Tash Aw, Five Star Billionaire

“For our family and others like us, separation is an expression of love. Not just in the physical sense, but in the way we think. We want our children to have an education and a job, to experience life in the way we never could, knowing that everything they gain will make them more distant from us. Loving someone means separating yourself from them. The future is lived vicariously through their achievements: their lives must follow an upward trajectory. They must not fail. That is what social mobility means in Asia today.”
― Tash Aw, Strangers on a Pier: Portrait of a Family

“Friendship is not necessary for closeness”
― Tash Aw, We, The Survivors

“they will never mock her either, because all the things that she has, she can never lose.”
― Tash Aw, Five Star Billionaire

“in a place like China. People rush ahead of you; they have no time to look back.”
― Tash Aw, Five Star Billionaire

“We burnt paper-money – we thought it was our fault, that we hadn’t done enough to appease the heavens. Everyone said, If we were richer, we could make more donations to the temple, we’d have better catches. They didn’t realise that there was nothing they could do about all the pollution flushing down the river that went right through the cities and emptied into the sea in front of our houses. Or from the offshore prawn farms that had started further up the coast where the water was deeper – you could smell the chemicals sometimes, late in the afternoon when the wind was blowing in the right direction”
― Tash Aw, We, the Survivors

“fake leather looks great until you use it in demanding situations, and then it shows its true colors and lets you down.”
― Tash Aw, Five Star Billionaire

“...my mother took a younger man as a lover. They spent all day in her boudoir, festering in each other's company.”
― Tash Aw

“All my beliefs are ill-founded, all my convictions weak. Yet I feel strangely alive. Funny, isn't it?”
― Tash Aw, The Harmony Silk Factory

“Their grandchildren will grow up so middle-class and affluent that the idea of deprivation will have no place in their lives, will seem to belong not to their country, but a much poorer neighbour like Cambodia or Bangladesh.”
― Tash Aw, Strangers on a Pier: Portrait of a Family

“And in the silence, I began to think: that's what frustrates me about a particular kind of migrant, the ones who drop their cultural baggage entirely in order to assimilate successfully into their new surroundings (as opposed to the other extreme, who cling desperately to memories of the homeland, and can't wait for the day they can retire and return to the place they have just left). For the problem with the Forgetters is that the need to wipe the slate clean in their adoptive country doesn't just begin and end with their arrival in their new land; it continues thereafter, repeating itself until it finds a convenient historical ground zero that is emotionally and intellectually untroubled, so that a new narrative about themselves is formed, a glowingly positive trajectory that strives for a clean story arc, complete with neatly packaged doses of pain - ultimately overcome, of course - that punctuate the rise to comfort and success and happiness.”
― Tash Aw, Strangers on a Pier: Portrait of a Family