The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

animal’s, raw, pitiful, incoherent. Not much of a hero, am I? thought Tian. I wish I were truly brave. You’re an ordinary man who was given an extraordinary choice, said the Monkey King.

For Evan, ignorance of history, a history that determined who he was in many ways, was a sin in itself.

It’s one of the central paradoxes of archaeology that in order to excavate a site so as to study it, we must consume it and destroy it in that process.

Every night, when you stand outside and gaze upon the stars, you are bathing in time as well as light.

But we should have conceded from the start that narratives are irreducibly subjective, though that does not mean that they do not also convey the truth.

Evan made me proud to be Japanese, and so he made me love myself. That was how I knew I was really in love with him.

He enjoys giving lectures, not because he likes hearing himself talk, but because he thinks he will learn something new each time he tries to explain.]

History is a narrative enterprise, and the telling of stories that are true, that affirm and explain our existence, is the fundamental task of the historian. But truth is delicate, and it has many enemies. Perhaps that is why, although we academics are supposedly in the business of pursuing the truth, the word “truth” is rarely uttered without hedg

Our lives are ruled by these small, seemingly ordinary moments that turn out to have improbably large effects. Such randomness is much more common in human affairs than in nature, and there was no way that I, as a physicist, could have foreseen what happened next.