Quotes from Celeste Ng

All those years, as the only other person who understood their parents, he had absorbed her miseries offering silent sympathy or a squeeze on the shoulder or a wry smile.

the school kitchen had been like the land of the giants, everything economy-sized: rolls of tinfoil half a mile long, jars of mayonnaise big enough to hold his head. His mother was in charge of bringing the world down to scale, chopping melons into dice-sized cubes, portioning pats of butter onto saucers to accompany each roll.

How porous the boundary was between him and the world, as if everything flowed through him like water through a net. She'd worried about him, moving through a rough world as a tender bare heart, beating out in the open where anything could cause a bruise.

Já não se lembrava de como era abraçar uma criança - abraçar fosse quem fosse - desta forma. Como o peso da outra pessoa se afunda em nós, como se agarram instintivamente. Como confiam em nós. Passa muito tempo até se sentir preparado para a largar.

Sadie eyed him, hands on hips. Bird, she said, with infuriating pity, you don't understand anything, so you?

There is nowhere to go but on.

She would listen and listen, waiting for them to come and find her. We didn't know , Hannah thinks. We would have come.

Once you owned an enormous chair like this, Pearl thought, you would simply have to stay put. You would have to plant roots and make the place that held this chair your home.

It's hard not to think and hope that your children might achieve great things—and to believe that they can accomplish anything if you only give them a boost along the way. But it's also hard to know when you're helping and supporting, and when you've crossed the line into pushing. And it's so easy to fall into the mindset of "I'm doing it for your own good.

The letter arrives on a Friday. I would like that, very much.

Não há outro sítio para onde seguir a não ser em frente. Ainda assim, uma parte dela anseia regressar por um instante - não para mudar o que quer que seja, nem sequer para falar com Lydia, nem para lhe dizer nada. Simplesmente abrir a porta e ver a filha ali, a dormir, uma vez mais, e saber que está tudo bem.

But I didn't know where she was going, Hannah whispers into the dark. I didn't know she was really going anywhere.

Of course Mirabelle would have a good life with Mark and Linda. There was no question about that. But would there be something—something—missing from her life if she were to grow up with them? Mr. Richardson was suddenly keenly conscious of Mirabelle, of the immense weight of the complicated world on this one tiny, vulnerable person.

Sadie eyed him, hands on hips. Bird, she said, with infuriating pity, you don't understand anything, do you?

Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too.

The hypothetical past perfect, the tense of missed chances.

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 all existed at once. You

Big cats, little cats, striped and calico and tuxedo, sitting pert, licking their paws, lolling in puddles of sunlight.

Everything that she had wanted for Lydia, which Lydia had never wanted but had embraced anyway.

Mac's Backs supplied him with well-worn copies of On the Road and Dharma Bums, the poems of Frank O'Hara and Rainer Maria Rilke and Pablo Neruda,

Somewhere in the center of this circle his daughter, friendless and alone, must have dived into the water in despair.

That was his mother: formidable and ferocious when her child was in need.

All weekend he'd wandered awestruck, trying to take it all in: the fluted pillars of the enormous library, the red brick of the buildings against the bright green of the lawns, the sweet chalk smell that lingered in each lecture hall. The purposeful stride he saw in everyone's walk, as if they knew they were destined for greatness.

Is she—dying?" Izzy whispered. It was a ridiculous question, but in that moment she was honestly terrified this might be true. If a soul could leave a body, she thought, this is the sound it would make: like the screech of a nail being pulled from old wood.