Quotes from Celeste Ng

Lydia has never really had friends, but their parents have never known.

James slid into his seat and the girl next to him asked, "What's wrong with your eyes?" It wasn't until he heard the horror in the teacher's voice—"Shirley Byron!"—that he realized he was supposed to be embarrassed; the next time it happened, he had learned his lesson and turned red right away.

Over the past two weeks she's worked her way through it [the book], a little each night, savoring the words like a cherry Life Saver tucked inside her cheek.

bring back our missing hearts.

All she could think was: I will be here forever. I will never be able to get away .

It struck her then, as if someone had said it aloud: her mother was dead, and the only thing worth remembering about her, in the end, was that she had cooked. Marilyn

There was no room left in her for anger. Something within her tipped and cracked.

as her mother promised to teach them everything a young lady needed to keep a house. As if, Marilyn thought, it might run away when you weren't looking.

To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for existed all at once.

Everything that loomed so large close up - all you had to do was step away, and they shrank to nothing. You could stop taking their phone calls, tear up their letters, pretend they'd never existed. Start over as a new person with a new life. Just a problem of geography, he thought, with the confidence of someone who had never yet tried to free himself of family.

condolences; a few of them pat Hannah on the head, as if she's

when he ran out of places to show her, he was sure, she would disappear.

She had learned, with Izzy's birth, how your life could trundle along on its safe little track and then,

with no warning, skid spectacularly off course.

To have such a deep taproot in a single place, to be immersed in it so thoroughly that it had steeped into every fiber of your being: she couldn't imagine it.

how your life could trundle along on its safe little track and then, with no warning, skid spectacularly off course.

There is no snow, yet, to hold footprints, and in a moment, as his father disappears from sight, it is as if he never passed that way at all. Today it strikes Bird as unbearably sad, to pass by and leave no trace of your existence. To have no one remember you'd been there.

At least I know who I am. What I want,

For her the magic was not what words had been, but what they were capable of: their ability to sketch, with one sweeping brushstroke, the contours of an experience, the form of a feeling. How they could make the effable effable, how they could never be fully unraveled, it held infinite mysteries and wonders and sometimes all you could do was stand agape, rubbing your eyes, trying to see properly.

For moving would never have been enough; he sees that now. It would have been the same anywhere. Children of Mixed Backgrounds Often Struggle to Find Their Place.

You'll always be sad about this, but it doesn't mean you made the wrong choice. It's just something that you have to carry.

You don't feel like smiling? Then what? Force yourself to smile. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy.

this was the first reason he came to love her: because she had blended in so perfectly, because she had seemed so completely and utterly at home.

The problem with rules, he reflected, was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the times there were simply "ways", none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure which side of the line you stood on. He had always admired his wife's idealism, her belief that the world could be made better, could be made orderly, could perhaps even be made perfect. For the first time, he wondered if the same held true for him