“For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“The palest ink will endure beyond the memories of man”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“Anything beautiful should be given a name, do you not agree?”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“I have become a collapsing star, pulling everything around it, even the light, into an ever-expanding void. Once I lose all ability to communicate with the world outside myself, nothing will be left but what I remember. My memories will be like a sandbar, cut off from the shore by the incoming tide. In time they will become submerged, inaccessible to me. The prospect terrified me. For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“Memories I had locked away have begun to break free, like shards of ice fracturing off an arctic shelf. In sleep, these broken floes drift toward the morning light of remembrance.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“That point in time just as the last leaf is about to drop, as the remaining petal is about to fall; that moment captures everything beautiful and sorrowful about life. Mono no aware, the Japanese call it.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“A raintree bent towards a window in one side of the bungalow, eavesdropping on the conversations that had taken place inside over years.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“It begins to rain softly, raising goose-pimples on the pond’s skin.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“We were like two moths around a candle, I thought, circling closer and closer to the flame, waiting to see whose wings would catch fire first.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“Before me lies a voyage of a million miles, and my memory is the moonlight I will borrow to illuminate my way.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“Some element in the air between us changed, as though a wind that had been blowing gently had come to an abrupt stillness.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“A garden is composed of a variety of clocks, Aritomo had once told me. Some of them run faster than the others, and some of them move slower than wee can ever perceive. I only understood this fully long after I had been his apprentice.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“Feel your body expanding as you breathe: that is where we live, in the moments between each inhalation and exhalation.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“Time did not exist; I had no idea of how many minutes had passed. And what was time but merely a wind that never stopped?”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“My eyes wondered from one end of the mountains to the other. 'Do you think they go on forever?'
'The mountains?' Aritomo said, as though he had been asked that question before. 'They fade away. Like all things.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the emperor of Japan.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“It was odd how Aritomo's life seemed to glance off mine; we were like two leaves falling from a tree, touching each other now and again as they spiraled to the forest floor.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“Below these words was the garden’s name in English: EVENING MISTS. I felt I was about to enter a place that existed only in the overlapping of air and water, light and time.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“There are some people...who might feel that such practices are misguided, like trying to wield heaven's powers on earth. And yet it was only in the carefully planned and created garden of Yugiri that I had found a sense of order and calm and even, for a brief moment of time, forgetfulness.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“Time is eating away my memory. Time, and this illness, this trespasser in my brain.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“I have become a collapsing star, pulling everything around it, even the light, into an ever-expanding void.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“You’ve forgiven the British?” He subsided into his seat. For a while he was silent, his gaze turned inward. “They couldn’t kill me when we were at war. And they couldn’t kill me when I was in the camp,” he said finally, his voice subdued. “But holding on to my hatred for forty-six years . . . that would have killed me.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“entire cottage industry centered just on Aritomo-sensei,”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“The mountains are as I have always remembered them, the first light of the morning melting down their flanks.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
Tan Twan Eng
Born place: Penang, Malaysia
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“Recordar puede ser tan doloroso cómo no recordar.”
― Elizabeth Chandler, quote from Evercrossed
“But just as we can all agree on what is red, even if we will never know if we each see it in the same way, so we can all agree - can’t we? - that no matter how confident we may appear to others, inside we are all sobbing, scared and uncertain for much of the time. Or perhaps it’s just me.
Oh God, perhaps it really is just me.
Actually it doesn’t really matter, when you come to think of it. If it is just me, then you are reading the story of some weird freak. You are free to treat this book like science fiction, fantasy or exotic travel literature. Are there really men like Stephen Fry on this planet? Goodness, how alien some people are. And if I am not alone, then neither are you, and hand in hand we can marvel together at the strangeness of the human condition.”
― Stephen Fry, quote from The Fry Chronicles
“Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated "building blocks," but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitute the final link in the chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can be understood only in terms of the object's interaction with the observer.”
― Fritjof Capra, quote from The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism
“Just tell me one more personal thing about yourself. I’m much more comfortable with Gabe than I am with Force.”
“Force equals mass times acceleration,” he said.”
― Olivia Cunning, quote from Try Me
“Once a blooming red rose, full of streaming life in its veins.
Now a wilting black petal rupturing with death and pain.”
― Jessica Sorensen, quote from Ember
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