Quotes from Celeste Ng

I have friends who've conceived easily, who've struggled to conceive, who've adopted or gone through invasive IVF procedures or used surrogates, or who've decided not to conceive—and the main constant in all of their experiences seems to be judgment.

They would trickle out in dribs and drabs, memories surfacing suddenly, prompted by the merest thread, the way memories often do.

Outside in the world, volcanoes erupted, governments rose and collapsed and bartered for hostages, rockets exploded, walls fell. But in Shaker Heights, things were peaceful, and riots and bombs and earthquakes were quiet thumps, muffled by distance.

she was trying on new skins, like all teenagers do,

And some people chide her for coming too late. One older woman—a Choctaw woman, whose granddaughter had been taken—looked at Margaret for a long time with weary eyes, then clicked her teeth.

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

everything had to be beautiful and perfect on the outside, no matter what mess lay within

Maybe this is simply what living is: an infinite list of transgressions that did not weigh against the joys but that simply overlaid them, the two lists mingling and merging, all the small moments that made up the mosaic of a person, a relationship, a life.

Any act of writing is an act of empathy: you try to imagine yourself into another person's mind and skin. I tried to ask myself the questions the characters would have asked themselves. The

They never discussed it, but both came to understand it as a promise: he would always make sure there was a place for her.

PACT: Preserving American Culture and Traditions.

When are you ever done with the story of someone you love?....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?

Now she thought of the fly landing daintily in the pool of resin. Perhaps it had mistaken it for honey. Perhaps it hadn't seen the puddle at all. By the time it had realised its mistake, it was too late. It had flailed, and then it had sunk, and then it had drowned.

Being allowed to do something and knowing how to do it are not the same thing." Moody

Practicality was baked into their bones.

This cookbook, Lydia knew, was her mother's favorite book, and she leafed through it with the adoration of a devotee touching a Bible.

was the same dirty tint that would be used, for years to come, to justify the sidelong glances at anyone who might seem Chinese, to excuse the refusals of service and shouted slurs and spat-in faces, and later on, the baseball bats, the booted feet.

parking lot.

But Lexie was seldom, if ever, offended: subtle implications and subtexts tended to bounce off the fine mesh of her brain.

They may have three or four cars instead of one or two, and they may have two television sets instead of one,

Anger is fear's bodygurad.

She knew that he was telling the truth, that this had been the truth for a long, long time.

The closed curtains glow like a blank television screen.

there was logic and order to the world; there was a system, and that system could be deciphered.