Quotes from Celeste Ng

At any given moment—every moment he could arrange, in fact—he was there with Pearl, in the booth at the diner, in the fork of a tree, watching her big eyes drink in everything around them as if she were ferociously thirsty.

Pearl, my darling," her mother said. "I'm so sorry. It's time to go." She took Mia's hand, and Pearl, uprooted, came free and followed her mother back to the car.

called you by name so insistently unless they

Proof, she told herself, that I'm just as smart as the others. That I belong.

It would disappear forever from her memory of Lydia, the way memories of a lost loved one always smooth and simplify themselves, shedding complexities like scales. For

Some pictures belong to the person who took them. And some belong to the person inside them.

She recognized it at once: love, one-way deep adoration that bounced off and did not bounce back; careful, quiet love that didn't care and went on anyway. It was too familiar to be surprising

That child who she thought had been her opposite but who had, deep inside, inherited and carried and nursed that spark her mother had long ago tamped down, that same burning certainty that she knew right from wrong.

when Marilyn had leaned over his desk and kissed him, this beautiful honey-haired girl, when she came into his arms and then into his bed, James could not quite believe it. The first afternoon they'd spent together, in his tiny whitewashed studio apartment, he marveled at how her body fit so perfectly against his: her nose nestled exactly into the hollow between his collarbones; her cheek curved to match the side of his neck. As if they were two halves of a mold.

She thought, as she would often for many years, of the photograph from that day, with the one golden feather inside it: Was it a portrait of her, or her daughter? Was she the bird trying to batter its way free, or was she the cage?

Oh, we don't use rabbits anymore," the pretty young doctor laughed, slipping the needle into the soft crook of Marilyn's arm. "We use frogs now.

When Pearl asked what his parents did all day, Moody had shrugged. "You know. They go to work." Work! When her mother said it, it reeked of drudgery: waiting tables, washing dishes, cleaning floors. But for the Richardsons, it seemed noble: they did important things.

To let her be alone with her grief, or whatever heavier thing she'd put on top to hold it down.

A part of her wanted to stay home, to simply be with her children, but her own mother had always scorned those women who didn't work. "Wasting their potential," she had sniffed. "You've got a good brain, Elena. You're not just going to sit home and knit, are you?" A modern woman, she always implied, was capable—nay, required—to have it all.

There is so much they need to say.

It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and

Oh, we don't use rabbits anymore," the pretty young doctor laughed, slipping the needle into the soft crook of Marilyn's arm. "We use frogs now. Much faster and easier. Isn't modern science wonderful?

I think if she'd been more careful this whole thing could've been avoided," he said stiffly. "I mean, use a condom. How hard is that? A buck at the drugstore and this whole thing would never have happened.

People decide what you're like before they even get to know you. They think they know all about you. Except, you're never who they think you are.

But those words had haunted James. How they must have wound around his heart, binding tighter over the years, slicing into the flesh.

This baby name May Ling. Please take this baby and give her a better life. That first night, when the baby had finally fallen asleep in their laps, Mr. and Mrs. McCullough spent two hours flipping through the name dictionary. It had not occurred to them, then or at any point until now, to regret the loss of her old name.

Izzy, Mia noticed, tended to respond by needling her mother even more, pushing her buttons with the expertise only a child could. Anger is fear's bodyguard.

Inside Lydia could feel it: everything that was to come . . . It was far away then, tiny in the distance, but Lydia already knew it would happen. The knowledge hovered all around her, clinging to her, every day getting thicker. Everywhere she went, it was there.

Finally, thank you to my son: you're still the best thing I've created.