Quotes from Celeste Ng

She had laid the headboard down flat near the flowerbeds that bordered the house, with the side rails below it and the slats to either side in neat rows, like ribs. It was as if the bed had drawn a deep breath and then gracefully flattened itself into the grass.

Succulents would grow anew from a broken-off leaf, pushing roots out into the air, then down into the soil: a piece of its own body, transformed into its child.

The earth is all scorched and black and everything green is gone. But after the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow." She held Izzy at arm's length, wiped her cheek with a fingertip, smoothed her hair one last time. "People are like that, too, you know. They start over. They find a way." Izzy nodded and turned to go, then turned back. "Tell her I'm so sorry," she said. Mia nodded. "See you tomorrow, okay?

Only when he's left Chinatown, and the faces around him become Black and white instead of Asian, do the flags become more sporadic, the people here apparently more confident that their loyalty will be assumed.

Dinnertime comes and goes, but none of them can imagine eating. It seems like something only people in films do, something lovely and decorative, that whole act of raising a fork to your mouth. Some kind of purposeless ceremony.

Staying unnoticed was how you survived.

I'm not saying there aren't bad mothers, she says. Just that you don't always know. What makes them do something, or not do something. Most of us, we're trying our best.

but there had also been an intense comfort in being close together, like small animals sheltered deep in their den.

It was like a landscape they could not see all at once; it was like the sky at night, which turned and turned so they couldn't find its edges. It would always feel too big.

He didn't know what exactly he wanted to say— I'm sorry, I didn't mean it —only the ever-deepening regret at how things were turning out between them, the desperate and impossible desire to go back to the way things had been.

Moody, gliding to a stop across the street, saw a slender girl in a long, crinkly skirt and a loose T-shirt with a message he couldn't quite read. Her hair was long and curly and hung in a thick braid down her back and gave the impression of straining to burst free.

With one finger he tips it from the shelf. The Boy Who Drew Cats: A Japanese Folktale. He's never seen this particular book before, but as soon as he sees the cover he knows it's the same story. A Japanese folktale

Being allowed to do something and knowing how to do it are not the same thing.

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 thought uneasily of her own life, of hours spent making breakfasts, serving dinners, packing lunches into neat paper bags. How was it possible to spend so many hours spreading peanut butter across bread?

A few people insisted that the Cape-to-Cairo Railroad was in Europe. For college students, they have surprising trouble with geography.

Lydia felt her heart in her chest like a pellet of ice, sliding down out of reach.

And we need their generosity to keep this place open. Or, just as likely, someone got nervous and got rid of it preemptively. Us public libraries--a lot of us just can't take the risk.

Like small animals sheltered deep in their den

It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight,

The librarian sighs. How can you know, she says, if no one teaches you, and no one ever talks about it, and all the books about it are gone?

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.

Mia held her for a moment, buried her nose in the part of Pearl's hair. Every time she did this, she was comforted by how Pearl smelled exactly the same. She smelled, Mia thought suddenly, of home, as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person whom she'd carried alongside her.

Children are a place

It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again.