Quotes from Celeste Ng

protegía su amistad como un dragón su tesoro: en silencio y con avaricia.

Even the younger Richardsons had it, this sureness in themselves.

glorified graffiti. But there were no murals. Each room had been painted a different color—the kitchen a sunny yellow, the living room a deep cantaloupe, the bedrooms a warm peach—and the overall effect was of stepping into a box of sunlight, even on a cloudy day.

You can't just do what you want, she thought. Why should Mia get to, when no one else did?

Now it was her turn to study Mrs. Richardson, as if the key to understanding her were coded into her face.

He had not been praying, but dreaming - which, she would realize later, came to almost the same thing.

Being a PAO, the authorities reminded everyone, was not itself a crime. PACT is not about race, the president was always saying, it is about patriotism and mindset.

She's twenty-three, he thinks; she knows nothing about life, wasted or otherwise.

The Good Life in Shaker Heights," Cosmopolitan, March 1963

Cinderella' from the point of view of the stepsisters. Maybe they weren't so wicked after all. Maybe she was actually a bitch to them.

When they had married, he and Marilyn had agreed to forget about the past. They would start a new life together, the two of them, with no looking back.

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

The firemen said there were little fires everywhere," Lexie said. "Multiple points of origin.

Behind them, empty bookshelves. Bird has never seen books on them, but there they stand, fossils of a long-gone era.

I remember a distinct sense of restlessness in the air while I was growing up, a feeling that if you wanted an exciting or important or interesting life, you needed to escape.

James is all too familiar with this kind of forgetting . . . he has felt it every day—that short-lived lull, then the sharp nudge to the ribs that reminded you that you didn't belong.

Searching for a spark of familiarity in the faces of strangers

the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she'd been and the child she'd become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It

But he never spoke of his parents, or his family. He still had few acquaintances and no friends. He still found himself shifting in his seat, as if at any moment someone might notice him and ask him to leave.

About which books are useful to their students and which books might expose them to dangerous ideas. Let me ask you something: Whose parents want them to spend time with bad people?

The sound of his car as it whines out of the driveway, then speeds away, has the ring of finality; all of them hear it. Silence settles over the house like ash.

He found himself daydreaming back to his own teenage years in Hong Kong, sneaking into the botanical gardens with Betsy Choy, those dreamlike afternoons he had never told anyone about, and had not remembered to relive, for many years. The young are always the same, always and everywhere, he thought, and he shifted the car into gear and drove on.

As if no one knew what to do in the face of such tragedy except to make the heaviest, heartiest, most prosaic dish they could, to give the bereaved something solid to hold on to.

remembered then that Lexie, thank god, had stayed over at Serena Wong's house last night. She wondered where Izzy had gotten to. She wondered where her sons were, and how she would find them to tell them what had happened.