Ken Liu > Quotes

“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.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others’ lives.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“What is fate but coincidences in retrospect?”
― Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings

“You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It's for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“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.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“There are many ways to say I love you in this cold, dark, silent universe, as many as the twinkling stars.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“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.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“There’s never going to be an end to suffering if ‘he deserves it’ is all the justification people need for inflicting pain.”
― Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings

“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.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“History is a narrative enterprise, and the telling of stories that are true, that affirm and explain our existence, is the fundamental task of the historian. But truth is delicate, and it has many enemies. Perhaps that is why, although we academics are supposedly in the business of pursuing the truth, the word “truth” is rarely uttered without hedges, adornments, and qualifications.
Every time we tell a story about a great atrocity, like the Holocaust or Pingfang, the forces of denial are always ready to pounce, to erase, to silence, to forget. 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.
One has to be careful, whenever one tells a story about a great injustice. We are a species that loves narrative, but we have also been taught not to trust an individual speaker.
Yes, it is true that no nation, and no historian, can tell a story that completely encompasses every aspect of the truth. But it is not true that just because all narratives are constructed, that they are equally far from the truth. The Earth is neither a perfect sphere nor a flat disk, but the model of the sphere is much closer to the truth. Similarly, there are some narratives that are closer to the truth than others, and we must always try to tell a story that comes as close to the truth as is humanly possible.
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.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“What is so bad about being compared to women?” Kuni said. “Half the world is made of women.”
― Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings

“Overly literal translations, far from being faithful, actually distort meaning by obscuring sense.”
― Ken Liu, The Three-Body Problem

“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.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“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.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“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.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“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.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“A lord who knows how to wield men is ten times more fearsome than one who knows only how to wield a sword.”
― Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings

“The more perfect the ideals, the less ideal the methods.”
― Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings

“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.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“All life is an experiment.”
― Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings

“But the real attraction of such technology has never been about capturing reality. Photography, videography, holography... the progression of such “reality-capturing” technology has been a proliferation of ways to lie about reality, to shape and distort it, to manipulate and fantasize. 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.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“Old friends are like old clothes: they fit the best.”
― Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings

“The truth is not delicate and it does not suffer from denial—the truth only dies when true stories are untold.”
― Ken Liu, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary

“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.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“You can’t tell how high a kite can fly without being willing to let all the string out.”
― Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings

“There is often no line between perfection and evil.”
― Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings

“I've always thought it nonsense to believe something true simply because it was written in a book long ago.”
― Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings

“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.”
― Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings

“It is like a gentle kitten is licking the inside of my heart.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories