Quotes from Celeste Ng

She smelled, Mia thought suddenly, of home, as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person whom she'd carried alongside her.

He'd forgotten: in fairylands there is evil, too. Monsters and curses. Dangers lurking in disguise. Demons, dragons, rats as big as oxen. things that could destroy you with a glance.

I could have done that, Marilyn thought, and the words clicked into place like puzzle pieces, shocking her with the rightness. The hypothetical past perfect, the tense of miss chances.

In Austin, outside the governor's mansion: a giant concrete cube with a crack running down the center, a crowbar by its side. Etched into the cube, four chiseled letters: P A C T. Etched into the crowbar: our missing hearts. One by one, passersby picked up the bar and hefted it, but no one dared swing, and when the police arrived they'd confiscated it as a dangerous weapon. The cube they loaded onto a flatbed and hauled away.

She'll pause over a peppermint, still twisted in cellophane, and wonder if it's significant, if it had meant something to Lydia, if it was just overlooked and discarded. She knows she'll find no answers. For now, she watches the figure in the bed, and her eyes fill with tears. It's enough.

He had been the only one listening for so long.

Moody had never thought much about money, because he never needed to. Lights went on when he flipped switches; water came out when he turned the tap.

The hypothetical past perfect, the tense of missed chances. Tears dripped down her chin. No, she thought suddenly. I could do that.

savoring the words like a cherry Life

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.

How could you blame Mia's parents for not understanding? They had been born in the wartime years; they'd been raised by parents who'd come of age in the Depression, who threw nothing out, not even moldy food. They were old enough to remember when rags became felt for the war effort, when cans and scrap metal could become bullets and cans of grease explosives. Practicality was baked into their bones. They wasted nothing, especially time.

Later she would wonder if this had made her miss her chance, or if she had ever had a chance at all.

drawn by the spectacle of sudden death

Then she took a piece of bread from the loaf in the bread box, spread it with butter and sprinkled it thickly with sugar, and set it in the oven until the sugar had melted to a bubbling, golden caramel.

He never completed the sentence, but in his imagined future, he floated away, untethered.

Avenue. The lobby was hushed as a library, but beyond those doors, she knew, were the cracked concrete sidewalks and the rush and clamor and ruthlessness of the city.

Los dos tenían esa sabiduría libresca que oculta una sorprendente ingenuidad.

James looks up to see Stanley Hewitt leaning though. He doesn't like Stan-a florid ham hock of a man who talks to him loudly and slowly, as if he's hard of hearing, who makes stupid jokes that start 'George Washington, Buffalo Bill, and Spiro Agnew walk into a bar…

she saw the store through new eyes: a place where you could find cocktail dresses from the sixties for Homecoming, surgical scrubs for lounging on sleepy days, a wide assortment of old concert tees, and, if you were lucky, bells, real bell-bottoms, not the back-again retro ones from the Delia's catalog but the actual thing, with wide flares, the denim tissue-thin at the knees from decades of wear.

Sometimes, though, when he saw her squatting in the corner of the playground, head leaning against the chain-link fence, he turned away, so she wouldn't have to pretend to be brave. To let her be alone with her grief, or whatever heavier thing she'd put on top to hold it down.

Vintage." Lexie sighed and set upon the rack with reverence.

She still powdered her nose after cooking and before eating; she still put on lipstick before coming downstairs to make breakfast. So they called it keeping house for a reason. Marilyn thought. Sometimes it did run away.

1981 glistening in his eyes like a beautiful far-off star.

People are like that, too, you know. They start over. They find a way.