Little Gods
Meng Jin
Top 10 Best Quotes
“It must be so terrible to see through everything like you do. It’s a form of blindness, you know. It gives you an excuse to do nothing while feeling superior, when really it’s just selfish, which is another way of saying stupid, lazy, everything you say you hate.”
“She was breaking, the edges of her, and through the cracks I saw something terrible, it was dark and powerful and churning, and I recognized with frightening clarity that everything I knew about Su Lan—her excellence, her beauty, her composure—was actually an attempt to control this thing. I realized that I did not know her, and did not want to.”
“I still enjoy it, being a terror. It’s better than being pathetic. It almost resembles a reason to live.”
“That was how it was: I wanted desperately to leave her and break her heart, but her heart would not be broken, so I came back, tried to make her love me, tried leaving again. Now I couldn’t break her heart if I wanted to. Instead, again, finally, she had broken mine.”
“Su Lan had a way of making you want to tell her everything. She was not only disarming—she asked as if she understood you perfectly, as if, once you opened the doors, she would be able to walk into your soul, treading gently, and know you only as you knew yourself.”
“Perhaps this was the first time I realized how simple it was to act as if certain parts of the past did not exist.”
“Liya looks from an airplane window at the curving boundary of ocean and sky below. Impossibly, she is sitting on her mother’s lap; they are going to America. Her mother says, Once we believed the earth was flat. We did not think that two people, flying like birds from the same point in opposite directions, would one day find themselves face-to-face. In a similar way we still misconceive of time. Time is not separate from space, they are in fact two aspects of the same thing. Imagine a sphere like the earth, but drawn in four dimensions instead of three. The fourth dimension, the one we have trouble seeing, is time. Imagine two people starting at the same point in space-time, flying around this new sphere, in opposite directions: one travels in the direction of the future, the other in the direction of the past. Just like the people who circle the earth, these travelers will eventually collide.”
“Later, when Su Lan was my wife, I would often be reminded of the crouching insecurity I had occasionally glimpsed in Bo. It was all rather simple, now that I think of it, the simple insecurity of being born poor. Today, it is clear this was the real reason she chose me over Bo: she was too recognizable to him. It did not matter that he alone, precisely because he had seen every part of her, could truly know her and thus truly love her. She did not want to be known, or perhaps, even, to be loved. She wanted more than anything to amputate that past from her self, to be accepted as the person she’d created, for her lover not to love her, but to make her someone new.”
“In the universe, there exist objects that cannot be seen or have not been seen—black holes, undiscovered planets, massive presences of gravity that assure us of their existence simply by the way they affect the behavior of nearby lesser objects. This, according to my mother, was the measure of an object: something that exerts substantial influence over others in its field, drawing continually toward itself, even if ever so slightly. In some ways, this evidence of effect is more necessary than sight. An image alone could be merely a hologram, a vision. No, scientifically speaking, seeing or not seeing is not equivalent to making be or not be. Rather, it is the inevitable attraction and movement of that which surrounds a mass that secures its position among real things.”
“In Chinese, I realized, verbs don’t change based on past or present tense. Instead you added a marker to the sentence indicating when an action occurred relative to the moment of speech, and this indication was more akin to an indication of space than of time. So instead of before and after, things happened in front of you and behind you, up the stream and down the stream.”
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Book Keywords:
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