Quotes from Celeste Ng

Her clearest memory of her father was a feel and a smell: the bristle of his cheek against hers as he lifted her up, and the tingle of Old Spice in her nostrils.

She could not mistake it. 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.

My mom says kids only need one parent. She says if my dad doesn't care enough to see me, it's his loss, not mine.

For the rest of her life, this would be what Marilyn thought of first when she thought of her mother. Her mother, who had never left her hometown eighty miles from Charlottesville, who always wore gloves outside the house, and who never, in all the years Marilyn could remember, sent her to school without a hot breakfast

Found and lost and found again, lost in plain sight, pressed to his back, her feet clasped in his hands. What made something precious? Losing it and finding it.

My mother just thinks I should marry someone more like me, then brushed it away, like dust onto the floor. But those words had haunted James. How they must have wound around his heart, binding tighter over the years, slicing into the flesh. He had hung his head like a murderer, as if his blood were poison, as if he regretted that their daughter had ever existed.

Lydia is dead.

A community is known by the schools it keeps.

He wants the old man to deliver a biting comeback, he wants the old man to punch the pizza guy in his smirking face, he wants the old man to back away before the pizza guy says—or does—something worse. Before he lifts those hands that pound and flatten thick dough into compliance. The moment tautens and tightens,

Listen, I've been thinking. 8 million people. All those stories passing from mouth to ear. Would one person be compelled. One out of 8 million. A fraction of a fraction. But not nothing. Absorbing that story. Passing it on. Listen. Somewhere out there, saying to others at last. Listen. This isn't right. None of them are sure how this will work. Where they will go. How they will find their way. But it is not impossible and right now that feels like enough.

Rules existed for a reason: if you followed them, you would succeed;

He understood everything she did not say, which at its core was: Don't let go .

How had it began? Like evrything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia's mother and father, because of her mother's and father's mothers and fathers.

His brain is like a big dog penned in his skull, restless and pacing, aching for a run.

He has never been in a place like this, where no one gives him a second glance. If his father was here, he'd be the one standing out, not Bird, and Bird laughs. For the first time in his life, he is unremarkable, and this feels like power.

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.

It seems inappropriate for the light to be so bright, for the sky to be so blue, and he's relieved when a cloud drifts over the sun and the water turns from silver to gray.

Qualcosa in quello scambio di sguardi tra madre e figlia aveva acciuffato il cuore di Mrs Richardson come un retino per farfalle.

how wide his shoulders were, like a swimmer's, his skin the color of tea, of fall leaves toasted by the sun.

They would make a pact: to let the past drift away, to stop asking questions, to look forward from them on, never back.

everything was saturated with sex; everywhere it oozed out, like dirty honey.

What do you get when you cross Ted Kaczynski with Monica Lewinsky? A dynamite blowjob!

Quando Pearl gli chiese cosa facessero i genitori tutto il giorno, Moody si strinse nelle spalle. «Be', vanno a lavorare». A lavorare! Quando lo diceva sua madre suonava come una sfacchinata: servire ai tavoli, lavare i piatti, pulire i pavimenti. Dai Richardson quella parola aveva un che di nobile: facevano cose importanti.

As he began to speak, her cheeks went hot, as if she'd stepped into summer sun.