Kristina Pauls’s Reviews > The Emperor of Gladness > Status Update

“Okay.” Hai nodded, but his mind was somewhere else. “Hey. Do you think a life you can’t remember is still a good life?” The question sounded almost silly aloud. “I mean, like—” “Yes,” said Sony. “Why’s that?” “Because someone else will remember it.”

“Because to remember is to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself. We murder ourselves, he thought, by remembering.”

“The hardest thing in the world is to live only once. But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree.”