Quotes from Celeste Ng

How suffocating to be so loved

It has been so long since he thought of his wife as a creature of want.

Era tão fácil (...) descobrir coisas sobre as pessoas. Estava tudo disponível, tudo sobre elas. Bastava procurar. Era possível descobrir qualquer coisa sobre alguém caso se esforçasse para isso.

In her experience, when someone tried to do something for her, it came from either pity or distrust, but this simple gesture felt like what it was: a small kindness, with no strings attached.

Le conditionnel passé, le temps des opportunités manquées.

Each room had been painted a different color—the kitchen a sunny yellow, the living room a deep cantaloupe, the bedrooms a warm peach—and the overall effect was of stepping into a box of sunlight, even on a cloudy day.

She replaces the phone number on the board, her damp fingers smudging the ink so that the digits blur as if in a strong wind, or underwater.

Later, when they look back on this last evening, the family will remember almost nothing. So many things will be pared away by the sadness to come.

Was she sad? She was angry. Furious at the smallness of her mother's life.

How good the rain would feel, like crying all over her body.

Have a good night,' he said, and Mia stepped out onto Fifth Avenue and let the city swallow her up.

In kindergarten, he had learned how to make a bruise: you pressed it over and over with your thumb. The first time it hurt so much your eyes watered. The second time it hurt a little less. The tenth time, it was barely an ache. So he read the note again and again. It didn't stop hurting. His eyes didn't stop watering.

The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart.

Everything, she noticed, seemed capable of transmogrification. Even the two boulders in the backyard sometimes turned to silver in the early morning sunlight. In the books she read, every stream might be a river god, every tree a dryad in disguise, every old woman a powerful fairy, every pebble an enchanted soul. Anything had the potential to transform, and this, to her, seemed the true meaning of art.

mientras su madre prometía a las alumnas enseñarles todo lo que una joven dama necesitaba para llevar las riendas de una casa. Como si una casa, pensó Marilyn, fuera algo que pudiera irse galopando si te distraías.

Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.

She was always doing that, telling him stories. Prying open cracks for magic to seep in, making the world a place of possibility.

if there's one thing he remembers from stories, it's that people who offer help along your way—whether directing you to treasure or warning you of danger—should not be ignored.

Everything, she had come to understand, was something like infinity. They might never come close, but they could approach a point where, for all intents and purposes, she knew all that she needed to know.

the night before? He had been away four whole

Looking out over the lake, she could not know that in three months she would be at its bottom.

He had thrown every rock he could find and it was still not enough.

They set up her nursery in the bedroom in the attic, where things that were not wanted were kept

As if they were two halves of a mold. He