Quotes from Celeste Ng

The occasional embrace, a head lean, just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fuse together and could never be taken apart.

A toothpick, inserted into a standard keyhole and snapped off flush, is a marvelous thing.

When, a long, long time later, he stares down at the silent blue marble of the earth and thinks of his sister, as he will at every important moment of his life. He doesn't know this yet, but he senses it deep down in his core. So much will happen, he thinks, that I would want to tell you.

James remembers: long ago, when they were young and the worst thing they could imagine was not being together . . . That moment, that connection, seems far away and small now, like something that happened in another life.

So many lives she would never know all unfolding behind those doors.

And then, as if the tears are telescopes, she begins to see more clearly:

When Lexie ordered from a menu, she never said, "Could I have . . . ?" She said, "I'll have . . ." confidently, as if she had only to say it to make it so.

In his own little hometown, they'd been suspicious of ideas: he'd grown up surrounded by a kind of resigned cynicism, though he'd been sure the world could be better.

Every bedroom was empty except for the smell of gasoline and a small crackling fire set directly in the middle of each bed, as if a demented Girl Scout had been camping there. By the time she checked the living room, the family room, the rec room, and the kitchen, the smoke had begun to spread, and she ran outside at last to hear the sirens, alerted by their home security system, already approaching.

she peeled the wrapper from the gum and put it between her lips and felt the mint bloom on her tongue.

education costs money. but then so does ignorance.

chuckle, a loud, insincere whinny that gallops around the room and then vanishes.

I stället ställde hon den fråga som flöt under alla de andra frågorna som en djup underjordisk flod. »Var jag önskad?«

Fair doesn't always mean right.

Now we're starting to be aware of the problems with not "seeing race": ignoring race means ignoring longstanding problems and history, as well as ignoring important aspects of a person's identity.

Later—and for the rest of his life—James will struggle to piece words to this feeling, and he will never quite manage to say, even just to himself, what he really means. At this moment he can think only one thing: how was it possible, he wonders, to have been so wrong.

More than once she'd seen Pearl lean over carelessly to fix Moody's collar; just the other day, she'd seen Moody reach out to pluck a wayward leaf from Pearl's hair with such tenderness that she could call it nothing other than love.

world without PACT; it is as axiomatic as gravity, or Thou shalt not kill. He didn't understand

They probably teach you that most plantation owners were kind to their slaves and that Columbus discovered America, don't they?

She's some kind of artist," Mrs. Richardson had said, and when Mr. Richardson asked what kind, she answered jokingly, "A struggling one.

higher standard than her other children, to demand more from her, yet at the same time to overlook her successes in favor of her faults.

If they want to help the black community, why don't they make some changes to the system first instead?

If she cries . . . it won't be tears. It will be little drops of blood.

Years of yearning had made her sensitive, the way a starving dog twitches its nostrils at the faintest scent of food. She could not mistake it. She recognized it at once: love, one-way deep adoration that bounced off and did not bounce back; careful, quiet love that didn't care and went on anyway.