Quotes from Celeste Ng

Ever since that summer, he had felt something still binding their ankles and tugging him off balance, fettering her weight to his. For ten years, that something had not loosened, and now it had begun to chafe. All those years, as the only other person who understood their parents, he had absorbed her miseries, offering silent sympathy or a squeeze on a shoulder or a wry smile. [...] He had buoyed her up with how too much love was better than too little.

she'd gotten the call and had driven directly to Babies "R" Us, buying everything from a complete wardrobe to a crib to six months' supply of diapers. "Maxed out the Visa," Linda McCullough had said with a laugh. "Mark was still putting the crib together when the social worker pulled up with her. But look at her. Just look at her. Can you believe this?" She had bent over the infant cradled against her, with a look of pure astonishment.

Maybe she didn't know what she was giving up until afterward. Maybe once she saw the baby she changed her mind.

Nothing is an accident,

Tinha aprendido que quando as pessoas estavam decididas a fazer algo que acreditavam ser uma boa ação, em geral era impossível dissuadi-las.

Later, when Moody saw the finished photos, he thought at first that Pearl looked like a delicate fossil, something caught for millennia in the skeleton belly of a prehistoric beast. Then he thought she looked like an angel resting with her wings spread out behind her. And then, after a moment, she looked simply like a girl asleep in a lush green bed, waiting for her lover to lie down beside her.

Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn't look like everyone else.

Five years, a year, even six months earlier, Lydia would have found sympathy in her brother's eyes. I know. I know. Confirmation and consolation in a single blink. This time Nath, immersed in a library book, did not notice Lydia's clenched fingers, the sudden red that rimmed her eyes. Dreaming of his future, he no longer heard all the things she did not say.

Most communities just happen; the best are planned":

warming them again with your heat. You touch the curves and hollows of every detail you have, memorizing them, reciting them once more though you already know them in your bones. Who ever thinks, recalling the face of the one they loved who is gone: yes, I looked at you enough, I loved you enough, we had enough time, any of this was enough?

She knew what her parents had longed for, without them saying a word, and she had wanted them happy.

of course she still donated to charity and voted Democrat, but so many years of comfortable suburban living had changed both of them.

The photos stirred feelings she couldn't quite frame in words, and this, she decided, must mean they were true works of art.

She smelled like fresh air and mint shampoo.

how hard it would be to inherit their parents' dreams. How suffocating to be so loved.

She glanced at her brothers, at her mother, still in her bathrobe on their tree lawn, and thought, They have literally nothing but the clothes on their backs.

When are you ever done with the story of someone you love? You turn the most precious of your memories over and over, wearing their edges smooth,

I dunno," she said. "People decide what you're like before they even get to know you." She eyed him, suddenly fierce. "Kind of like you did with me. They think they know all about you. Except you're never who they think you are.

ANGER IS FEAR'S BODYGUARD, a poster in the hospital

but she had spent most of her childhood in libraries, taking refuge among the shelves as a new girl bouncing from school to school, absorbing books as if they were air

Did you have to burn down the old to make way for the new?

Left unsaid was that unity required a common enemy. One box in which to collect all their anger; one straw man to wear the hats of everything they feared.

Do you want me to leave?' Lexie shook her head. 'Stay,' she said. 'It's fine. I'm fine. Just stay.' After a moment, Izzy slid a square piece of paper across the table, and Lexie took it and began to follow her sister's lead: folding over, back, to the center, out, until at last she took hold of the corners and pulled and a crane bloomed like a pale flower in her hands.

Lydia—so long enthralled by the dreams of others—could not yet imagine what that might be, but suddenly the universe glittered with possibilities.