Quotes from Celeste Ng

I HAVE MEASURED OUT MY LIFE WITH COFFEE SPOONS. DO I DARE TO EAT A PEACH? DO I DARE DISTURB THE UNIVERSE?

He remembers again, and he is always angrier than before.

For her the magic was not what words had been, but what they were capable of: their ability to sketch, with one sweeping brushstroke, the contours of an experience, the form of a feeling.

If she were a white girl . . . none of this would ever have happened.

Practicality was baked into their bones. They wasted nothing, especially not time.

the streets swarming with unabashed fecundity,

when personally affected by the issues, even idealists often end up making selfish choices with far-reaching effects. It's human nature,

A million little chances to change the future.

So much will happen, he thinks, that I would want to tell you.

He has almost forgotten what it felt like. To touch her. To be forgiven even just this much

figurehead of

It is not too late. It is not too late.

Half an hour later, the dancing and the liquor and the sweet, heady rush of being eighteen had filled them both with a feverish flush.

His skin feels too small for his thoughts.

immense and shocking potential.

To Lexie, the world seemed nearly perfect, and her fantasies were her real life with all the colors dialed up.

Margaret did not question; she understood this, how slippery and elastic time was in the fact of your child, how it seemed to move not in a line but in endless loops, circling back again and again, overwriting itself.

But the problem with rules, he reflected, was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When in fact, most of the time there were simply ways.

the feeling that the place you're in is too small.

Everything seems new. The outlines of his furniture. The sunbeams slicing across the carpet. His hands before his face.

And finally, most crucially: preventing the spread of un-American views by quietly removing children from un-American environments—the definition of which was ever expanding: Appearing sympathetic to China. Appearing insufficiently anti-China. Having any doubts about anything American; having any ties to China at all—no matter how many generations past.

with the idea of starting over, so nearly all of her work has to do with change or transformation in some

You'll always be sad about this. But it doesn't mean that you made the wrong choice. It's just something that you have to carry.

He wonders who decided which books were too dangerous to keep, and who it was that had to hunt down and collect the condemned books, like an executioner, ferrying them to their doom.