Quotes from Celeste Ng

All the boys will be after you now.

Before that she hadn't realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it. Anything her mother wanted, she had promised. As long as she would stay. She had been so afraid.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. One went up and the other went down. One gained, the other lost. One escaped, the other was trapped, forever.

Just a problem of geography, he thought, with the confidence of someone who had never yet tried to free himself of family.

Each year they learn the same thing, just in bigger words.

Now, when Marilyn says this—If she were a white girl—it proves what James has feared all along. That inside, all along, she'd labeled everything. White and not white. That this thing makes all the difference in the world.

Before that she hadn't realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.

A million little chances to change the future. They should never have married. He should never have touched her. She should have turned around, stepped out of his office into the hallway, walked away. He sees with utter clarity: none of this was supposed to happen. A mistake.

Neither ever mentioned this most tender hope.

A small tug at a complicated knot that would take generations to unpick.

Something inside Izzy reached out to something in her and caught fire.

A game they played, he and his mother, when he was very small. Before school, before he had any other world but her.

What had they missed that they should have seen? What small gesture, forgotten, might have changed everything? They will pick it down to the bones, wondering how this had all gone so wrong, and they will never be sure.

You never got what you wanted ; you just learned to get by without it.

They seemed so bare, so empty. Like a face without features. He

To the others it was just another photo, but to them it was unbearably intimate, like catching a glimpse of your own naked body in a mirror.

PACT: Preserving American Culture and Traditions. A solemn promise to root out any anti-American elements undermining the nation.

But after the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow.

Everything she had dreamed for herself faded away, like fine mist on a breeze. She could not remember now why she thought it had all been possible.

Na maioria dos casos, toda a gente merece mais do que uma oportunidade. Todos nós fazemos coisas que lamentamos de vez em quando e que teremos de levar para sempre dentro de nós.

But PACT is more than a law. It's a promise we make to each other: a promise to protect our American ideals and values; a promise that for people who weaken our country with un-American ideas, there will be consequences. • from Let's Learn About PACT: A Guide for Young Patriots

And finally, most crucially: preventing the spread of un-American views by quietly removing children from un-American environments—the definition of which was ever expanding:

His father's oldest habit: taking words apart like old clocks to show the gears still ticking inside.

How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia's mother and father, because of her mother's and father's mothers and fathers. Because long ago, her mother had gone missing, and her father had brought her home. Because more than anything, her mother had wanted to stand out; because more than anything, her father had wanted to blend in. Because those things had been impossible.