J.Y. Yang > Quotes

“The saying goes, ‘The black tides of heaven direct the courses of human lives.’ To which a wise teacher said, ‘But as with all waters, one can swim against the tide.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“With all the horrors in the world, it was easy to forget there were wonders too.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“Let the black tides of heaven direct our lives,” he murmured. He turned to look at his partner. “I choose to swim.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“People make mistakes. They can't be mistakes.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“The powerful can make the truth dance to their song.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“You weren’t to blame. Violence is the fault of the one enacting it. Always.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Red Threads of Fortune

“The mountain shrugs, but thinks nothing of the houses crushed in the avalanche. That was not its purpose.” “And that’s meant to be comforting?” “Yes,” said Mokoya, a little too earnestly. “Because it’s not about you, or what you’ve done. There’s no bigger reason to things.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“In the monastery,” Mokoya said, “they taught us that fortune is both intractable and impartial. That when bad things happen, it’s the result of an incomprehensible and inhuman universe working as it does. The mountain shrugs, but thinks nothing of the houses crushed in the avalanche. That was not its purpose.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“Because he had always known, even as a child, that he was the lightning, while she was the fire in the core of planets. And the world needed both. Revolutions needed both. Someone had to wield the knives, but someone also had to write the treaties.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“In the marsh of half sleep, everything was perfectly logical, but nothing made any sense.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Red Threads of Fortune

“A coup is a coup is a coup, and a bullet can kill you regardless of ideology.”
― J.Y. Yang, Waiting on a Bright Moon

“You hiss: “I joined the rebellion so my fate wouldn’t be decided by men like you.”
― J.Y. Yang, Waiting on a Bright Moon

“What changed your mind?” “Nothing, actually. I just thought, I don’t want to live with this kind of fear and doubt all my life. Where even expressions of love have to be taken with suspicion.”
― J.Y. Yang, Waiting on a Bright Moon

“Is she watching? What is she thinking? How could she just stand there? But then, are you not also sitting where you are, and watching?”
― J.Y. Yang, Waiting on a Bright Moon

“There are no righteous deaths,” Yongcheow whispered. “Only ones that cannot be avoided.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“After she died I took her story and folded it into the fiber of my being,”
― J.Y. Yang, Circus Girl, The Hunter, and Mirror Boy

“The onset of age was like a dam breaking: slowly at first, then all at once.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“A world of hot wind and bursting stars”
― J.Y. Yang, The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories

“How simple our wants are as children, how easily satisfied.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories

“I don’t care about the fortunes. I care about doing whatever you can, with whatever’s in front of you. Because it’s the only thing you can do.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“Where there was a jungle of fear and uncertainty, there shall be the shape of hidden things revealed. Where there were storms of lies, there will be truth.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Descent of Monsters

“Maybe it was for the better. Teach them early that dreams and wishes are things that bring only pain, that nothing comes for free, that for every piece of good fortune, somehow and somewhere the universe will balance itself out with misfortune.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories

“Mena wondered if her grandmother, the djinn, had ever thought of reshaping the world so it was more amenable to her. A world of hot wind and bursting stars, where women walked strong and brown and proud over land that sang to their bones, where the fires that burned in their veins were lights in the firmament and not threats to be smothered into nothingness at all costs.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories

“The iron bars of a cage can be kind of a comfort when the world outside is all hungry teeth and slicing fins.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories

“Peoples desires were easy to read, clear as bottled glass and just as sturdy.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories

“When the threads of fortune change direction, how many are caught in the trap of their weaving?”
― J.Y. Yang, The Ascent to Godhood

“HIS NAME WAS Thennjay Satyaparathnam.”
― J.Y. Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven

“But we will not bury our mother. We have no interest in putting her bones in soft ground, no desire for memorials and platitudes, no feelings attached to the organic detritus of her terminated existence.”
― J.Y. Yang, Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Two

“My greatest fear is not that I will find some sort of half-animal creature, wild-eyed and untamed. It is that I will find a genuine monster: someone perfectly human but with a heart of stone, turned cruel from enduring years of cruelty. What if they are not a tool enslaved by the Protectorate but a willing blade? What if they are proof of what I should have known all along—that there is something broken inside me, only waiting for the right environment to bring it out?”
― J.Y. Yang, The Descent of Monsters

“Great squid. There’s been another murder.”
― J.Y. Yang