Quotes from Celeste Ng

Please, Marilyn thinks. In this word is all she cannot phrase, even to herself. Please come back, please let me start over, please stay. Please.

grown up surrounded by a kind of resigned cynicism,

PACT protects innocent children from being indoctrinated with false, subversive, un-American ideas by unfit and unpatriotic parents. He taps the paper.

rainbow of different, beautiful lies. But now, seeing the picture

Most? What does that mean?

She will figure out what happened to Lydia. She will find out who is responsible. She will find out what went wrong.

trompe l'oeil row of lockers marked the hallway down to the Social Room, a lounge designated for the seniors, where there was a microwave for making popcorn during free periods, and a Coke machine that cost only fifty cents instead of seventy-five like the ones in the cafeteria, and a chunky black cube of a jukebox left over from the seventies and now loaded with Sir Mix-a-Lot and Smashing Pumpkins and the Spice Girls.

Turning your energy toward what's to come, leaning into the light. When you were born, your father wanted you to have my name. Miu: a seedling. He liked that idea, you as our little sprout. But I chose his: Gardner. One who makes things grow. I wanted you to be not only the grown, but the grower. To have power over your own life, turning your energy toward what's to come, leaning into the light.

It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds core, and all.

For Mia, however, the photographs were only a vague approximation of what she wanted to express, and she soon found herself not only altering the prints – with everything from ballpoint pen to splashes of laundry detergent – but experimenting with the camera itself, bending its limited range to her desires.

She thought, as she would often for many years, of the photograph from that day, with the one golden feather inside it: Was it a portrait of her, or her daughter? Was she the bird trying to batter its way out, or was she the cage?

But she herself had never felt that way about anyone, not as a teenager, not in art school, not since. It occurred to her that except for her brother, when they were children, she'd never seen a man naked. More than that: she'd never touched anyone and felt that warmth, that electric tension at the nearness of someone else. The only thing that had given her that feeling had been art—and then, of course, Pearl.

what could be less satisfying than stealing from someone so endowed that they never even noticed what you'd taken?

Marilyn smiled back, a fake smile. The same one she had given to her mother all those years. You lifted the corners of your mouth toward your ears. You kept your lips closed. It was amazing how no one could tell.

they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time 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.

a haze of formless, pervasive emotion, nothing she could grasp, but full of looming thoughts that appeared from nowhere, startling her, then receded into whiteness again before she was even sure what she had seen.

Izzy had the heart of a radical, but she had the experience of a fourteen-year-old living in the suburban Midwest. Which is to say: she cast about for ideas for exacting revenge -- egged windows, flaming bags of dog shit -- and chose the best thing in her limited repertoire.

Everything that she had wanted for Lydia, which Lydia had never wanted but had embraced anyway. A dull chill creeps over her. Perhaps—and this thought chokes her—that had dragged Lydia underwater at last.

nothing in the bag but a quart

She had never seen an adult cry like that, with such an animal sound. Recklessly. As if there were nothing more to be lost. For years afterward, she would sometimes wake in the night, heart thumping, thinking she'd heard that agonized cry again.

She's going to get through this. Because she has to.

This was what would haunt Mrs. McCullough most: that Mirabelle hadn't cried out when Bebe had reached into the crib and lifted her up and taken her away. Despite everything—despite the homemade food and the toys and the late nights and the love, so much love, more love than Mrs. McCullough could have imagined possible—despite it all, she still had felt Bebe's arms were a safe place, a place she belonged.

was too much luck. He feared the day the universe would notice he wasn't supposed to have her and take her away. Or that she might suddenly realize her mistake and disappear from his life as suddenly as she had entered. After a while, the fear became a habit, too.

Years of yearning had made her sensitive, the way a starving dog twitches its nostrils at the faintest scent of food.