Quotes from Celeste Ng

Anything had potential to transform, and this, to her, seemed the true meaning of art.

Mom," she said. "Dad. It's not what you think.

settled on her shoulders like a heavy bag, and she wanted badly to blurt it out to her husband, to share some of its weight, but she pushed it away.

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.

She tried to reconcile what Lexie was saying with the Lexie she knew. Lexie wanted an abortion? Baby-crazy Lexie, quick-to-judge-others Lexie, Lexie who'd been so unforgiving about Bebe's mistakes?

What the news calls people who protest PACT: Seditious subversives. Traitorous Chinese sympathizers. Tumors on American society.

I always find that regular habits make for a calmer life.

They had been a team. They had stuck together, even in this small, silly thing. She had never expected a time when that would not be true.

The little bird in his throat had died and swelled so that he could hardly breathe.

All her life she had heard her mother's heart Drumming one beat: doctor, doctor, doctor. She wanted this so much, Lydia knew, that she no longer needed to say it. It was always there. Lydia could not imagine another future, another life. It was like trying to imagine a world where the sun went around the moon, or where there was no such thing as air.

This was what would haunt Mrs. McCullough most: that Mirabelle hadn't cried out when Bebe had reached into the crib and lifted her up and taken her away.

Život s ohledem na prakti?nost a pohodlí dosedl na jiskru v jejím nitru jako tlustá, t?žká deka.

they both knew all the details would be a long time in coming. They would trickle out in dribs and drabs, memories surfacing suddenly, prompted by the merest thread, the way memories often do.

Son, it's time to go home

The way he hadn't even glanced at them, as if he were focused on something far-off on the horizon or deep, deep in the past.

The weight of everything he's read settles on him, crushing him to his chair. It is too heavy. He cannot even lift his head.

ground up into dingy gray, flushed down into the sewer in a mess of shit and piss. Something goes hot and liquid behind his eyes.

Vše zas a znova kon?ilo u jedné a téže otázky: Co d?lá n?koho matkou? Výhradn? biologie, nebo je to láska?)

Different has always been a brand on his forehead, blazoned there between the eyes. It has tinted his entire life, this word; it has left its smudgy fingerprints on everything.

To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and 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.

They were kind people who thought they meant well. They'd been government-selected as fit parents, certified as people of good moral character who could teach good patriotic values.

Maybe, she thinks, 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. What Bird will learn, then: That his mother is fallible. That she is only human, too.

You could figure out anything about a person if you just tried hard enough.

I don't have a plan, I'm afraid...But then, no one really does, no matter what they say.