Quotes from Celeste Ng

Evidence of his mother, out there, elsewhere, so worried about somebody else's children though she'd left her own behind. The irony of it leached into his veins.

as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person whom she'd carried alongside her.

People decide what you're like before they even get to know you.

Up there- eighty-five miles high, ninety, ninety-five, the counter said- everything on earth would be invisible. Mothers who disappeared, fathers who didn't love you, kids who mocked you - everything would shrink to pinpoints and vanish. Up there : nothing but stars.

I know what to do . . . I just can't do it.

Everything Mrs. Richardson had put out of her mind from the hospital stay—everything she thought she'd forgotten—her body remembered on a cellular level: the rush of anxiety, the fear that permeated her thoughts of Izzy. The microscopic focus on each thing Izzy did, turning it this way and that, scrutinizing it for signs of weakness or disaster.

Getting information out of interviewees, she had learned over the years, was sometimes like walking a large, reluctant cow: you had to turn the cow onto the right path while letting the cow believe it was doing the steering.

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. Every time Mrs. Richardson looked at Izzy, that feeling of things spiraling out of control coiled around her again, like a muscle she didn't know how to unclench.

His parents never go out or entertain; they have no dinner parties, no bridge group, no hunting buddies or luncheon pals. Like Lydia, no real friends.

the right side of her heart had swollen, as if it had had too much to hold.

He enjoys the surprise on people's faces when he tells them he's a professor of American history. "Well, I am American," he says when people blink, a barb of defensiveness in his tone. Someone

Hannah, as if she understood her place in the cosmos, grew from quiet infant to watchful child: a child fond of nooks and corners, who curled up in closets, behind sofas, under dangling tablecloths, staying out of sight as well as out of mind, to ensure the terrain of the family did not change.)

With each roll of film, however, she began to understand more and more how a photograph was put together, what it could do and what it could not, just how far you could stretch and twist it. Though she did not know it at the time, all of this was training her to be the photographer she would become.

We don't burn our books, she says. We pulp them. Much more civilized, right? Mash them up, recycle them into toilet paper. Those books wiped someone's rear end a long time ago. Oh, says Bird. So that's what happened to his mother's books. All those words

Each test score had been lower than the last, reading like a strange weather forecast: ninety in September, mid-eighties in October, low seventies in November, sixties before Christmas.

Izzy, sit up straight," she would say at the dinner table, thinking: Scoliosis. Cerebral palsy. "Izzy, calm down." Though she would never quite articulate it this way, resentment began to sheathe concern. ANGER IS FEAR'S BODYGUARD,

Don't ever smile if you don't want to," she said, and Hannah, half-blinded by the spotlight of Lydia's whole attention, nodded. "Remember that.

When she spoke of Pauline Hawthorne, her tone was half the adoration of a schoolgirl for a crush, half the adoration of a devotee for a saint. It had not been clear, at first, that it would turn out that way.

Everyone in the Richardson family noticed Izzy's improved demeanor. "She's almost pleasant around you," Lexie told Mia one day. Izzy's adoration for Mia, like everything she did, did not come by halves: there was nothing Izzy wouldn't do for her.

Don't , she wanted to say, though she didn't know: don't what? She knew only that something was about to happen, and that nothing she could say or do would prevent it.

Sometimes, just when you think everything is gone, you find a way.

And some people chide her for coming too late. One older woman—a Choctaw woman, whose granddaughter had been taken—looked at Margaret for a long time with weary eyes, then clicked her teeth. You think this is something new? She shook her head.

Sometimes, just when you think everything's gone, you find a way." Mia racked her mind for an explanation. "Like after a prairie fire. I saw one, years ago, when we were in Nebraska. It seems like the end of the world. 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.

the way memories of a lost loved one always smooth and simplify themselves, shedding complexities like scales.