Literary Birthday – 25 May – Madeleine Thien

Happy Birthday, Madeleine Thien, born 25 May 1974.

Six Quotes

1. I like to think of home as a verb, something we keep recreating.
2. The only life that matters is in your mind. The only truth is the one that lives invisibly, that waits even after you close the book. Silence, too, is a kind of music. Silence will last.
3. People aren’t made to float through the air. Unless we know the weight of our bodies, unless we feel the force of gravity, we’ll forget what we are, we’ll lose ourselves without even noticing.
4. Sometimes, I think, you can look at a person and know they are full of words. Maybe the words are withheld due to pain or privacy, or maybe subterfuge. Maybe there are knife-edged words waiting to draw blood.
5. She said that the past was not static, our memories fold and bend, we change with every step taken into the future.
6. He’d been thinking about the quality of sunshine, that is, how daylight wipes away the stars and the planets, making them invisible to human eyes. If one needed the darkness in order to see the heavens, might daylight be a form of blindness? Could it be that sound was also a form of deafness? If so, what was silence?

Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. She is the author of  Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which won various awards and it was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize.

Source for image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Madeleine_Thien.jpg

Simon Fraser University – University Communications, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

{6}