E. Lily Yu > Quotes

“Wherever the good letters had fallen like stars, souls flashed forth from formerly blank faces. People danced in puddles, muddy to their waists. Kissed each other. Clasped hands. Spoke tenderly. Wept.”
― E. Lily Yu, On Fragile Waves

“Anyone can suffer. But joy--that's hard. Ask about joy.”
― E. Lilly Yu, On Fragile Waves

“A perfect society needs no rulers," they said. "Knowledge and authority ought to be held in common. In order to imagine a new existence, we must free ourselves from the structures of both our failed government and the unjustifiable hegemony of the wasp nests. Hear what you can hear and learn what you can learn while we remain among them. But be ready.”
― E. Lily Yu, Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 55, April 2011

“You put bits of stories together to make a home or a family. Some you’re given, and some you make by living. A nightmare is when the ugliest, most ferocious pieces clump together and go hunting for other stories to eat. Firuzeh said: You can’t fight a story. You can. Break a nightmare into its little bits of story, and, bam, no more nightmare.”
― E. Lily Yu, On Fragile Waves

“I ask you, what is the difference between war and not-war when there is no music”
― E. Lily Yu, On Fragile Waves

“But beneath his lightness was an injury. She had wounded him, she saw, just as the day had wounded her; thoughtlessly, irreparably, the way a crane dangling a steel girder might gash the beams around it. And she could not tend to that injury while her own was so raw.”
― E. Lily Yu, On Fragile Waves

“Thus far they had not needed much medicine, since hope had done triple duty as amulet, tonic, and prophylactic. Now that the bottle had been smashed, there was no help other than nurses and pills.”
― E. Lily Yu, On Fragile Waves

“when time is no time at all and everything must be said in the breath between”
― E. Lily Yu, On Fragile Waves

“When you have nothing and no reason to hope, when the odds are impossible and not one but two governments stand against you, how do you laugh? How do you see beauty? How do you still show kindness and love?”
― E. Lily Yu, On Fragile Waves

“Then Abay turned on the radio and on the fragile waves they heard a dambura strumming a milk-and-sugar song. It's over, thank God, said Atay, and went to work.”
― E. Lily Yu, On Fragile Waves

“There was perhaps no other school in the greater Melbourne area, perhaps no other school in Australia, that had so many children of war. Some shy, some loud, some laughing, some quiet—and every one of them on a hair trigger. Every one of them swallowing barrels and buckets of the wrath, frustration, grief, and shame that other Year 6 students sipped in juice-box amounts.”
― E. Lily Yu, On Fragile Waves

“I tried, Nasima said, but they didn’t see me. Like when I was alive. I was a daughter-shaped space in the universe. You feed it. You put shoes and dresses on it. You raise it properly, like a sheep, so you can take it to market someday. But you don’t see her, you don’t see your daughter, not really. Not the way you see your sons. Who are worth something. Who’ll work someday.”
― E. Lily Yu, On Fragile Waves

“When they came within a few meters of their tent, Firuzeh grasped her skirt and ran. Her anger hissed out between her teeth. Now her mother would see her. There you are, she would say Or, were you behind me that whole lonely time? Or, I am so sorry I forgot about you.”
― E. Lily Yu, On Fragile Waves

“If Firuzeh married a snake who was also a man, wouldn’t you try to make him less snake and more man?”
― E. Lily Yu, On Fragile Waves

“No, see, both of those options have come and gone. But here we are, still waiting. All of us had something to wait for, and that kept us going. Now we don’t. Now the minutes of our lives are wasted. Time scrapes our nerves. It hurts. How it hurts.”
― E. Lily Yu, On Fragile Waves

“Once a man and a woman drowned in each other’s eyes on dry land, and no one could figure out how they died.”
― E. Lily Yu, On Fragile Waves

“Love ’em, leave ’em. Sometimes I even leave them alive”
― E. Lily Yu, The Time Invariance of Snow

“Firuzeh threw a flower at him. They ran from tree to tree, all the way down the street, flinging sticky blue flowers at each other and laughing. The sky purpled and dimmed. When they reached their flat, all of them covered in flowers, Abay unlocked the door, turned on the porch light, and brushed each of them clean before letting them in. And then they were home.”
― E. Lily Yu, On Fragile Waves