When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day — but by the minute.
Iris ChangRead
The spoken word vanished with the wind. Likewise, the unrecorded life disappears as if it never existed.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Our spoken words and unrecorded lives fade away, leaving little trace behind.
Iris Chang's quote emphasizes the impermanence of spoken communication and lived experiences that are not documented. It highlights the importance of recording our lives and words, suggesting that without preservation, our existence may ultimately be forgotten, much like whispers carried away by the wind.
Themes
MemoryImpermanenceRecordingCommunicationExistence
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared during a speech about the importance of writing and documenting personal stories.
More from Iris Chang
All quotes →Your first duty as a writer is to write to please yourself. And you have no duty towards anyone else.
Iris ChangRead
For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction.
Iris ChangRead
Racism is always there underneath, but usually it is exploited in these times of economic crisis, and it's hard to find out when one slides into another.
Iris ChangRead
Almost all people have this potential for evil, which would be unleashed only under certain dangerous social circumstances.
Iris ChangRead
Similar quotes
Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they’ve got none to spend. That’s our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out.
D. H. LawrenceRead
People can be slave-ships in shoes.
Zora Neale HurstonRead
Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal process──which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake.
Lytton StracheyRead
I had a sense then of how if we truly understood how many of the unimportant things we do will end up outliving us, we'd never be able to go on.
David LevithanRead
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
Arthur C. ClarkeRead
People who read me seem to be divided into four groups: twenty-five percent like me for the right reasons; twenty-five percent like me for the wrong reasons; twenty-five percent hate me for the wrong reasons; twenty-five percent hate me for the right reasons. It's that last twenty-five percent that worries me.
Robert FrostRead