Quotes from Celeste Ng

Life isn't fair, or fair doesn't always mean right.

e pegou no diário que a mãe lhe dera no Natal. Até que enfim acontecera algo importante, algo que devia registar. Mas não sabia como explicar o que se passara, como tudo mudara num único dia, como alguém que amava tanto podia estar ali num minuto e, no minuto seguinte ter desaparecido.

Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. Remember that the people you are talking to are a hundred times more interested in themselves and their wants and problems than they are in you and your problems.

A cama cheira a sono da irmã: um odor caloroso e almiscarado e marcante - como o de um animal selvagem - que surgia apenas quando ela estava a dormir profundamente.

Izzy had the heart of a radical, but she had the experience of a fourteen-year-old living in the suburban Midwest. Which was to say: she cast about for ideas for exacting revenge—egged windows, flaming bags of dog shit—and chose the best thing in her limited repertoire. Three afternoons later, Pearl

The same place people went when they died, where everything went: on, away, out of your life.

Yawning gaps of time when she could have been anywhere, doing anything.

In the watery light the cats are a tangle of angles and curves. A secret message? A code? Letters in their stripes, perhaps, in the points of their ears or the bends of their tails? He turns the letter this way and that, traces the ballpoint lines with the beam. On a tabby he thinks he spots an M; the arched leg of a black cat looks like an S, or maybe an N.

Pearl was smarter than any of them and yet she seemed comfortable with everything she didn't know: she lingered comfortably in the gray spaces.

I realize that I am not happy with the life I lead. I always had one kind of life in mind and things have turned out very differently.

There is so much more to do, so much yet to be mended.

Once upon a time. Once upon a time there was—a boy who loved cats.

Still: she returns in sudden flashes. Like scraps of half-remembered dreams.

He wanted to twine himself in the tiny curlicues of her handwriting.

Era impossível equivocar-se. Reconheceu-o de imediato: amor, uma adoração não correspondida que saltava mas não ressaltava; amor cauteloso e plácido que não se importava e prosseguia de qualquer forma. Era demasiado familiar para a surpreender. De dentro dela, algo se esticou e envolveu Jack como um xaile, mas ele não reparou.

Later, slowly, they will piece together other things that have never been said.

Love, Hannah decided, would be sweet, like her mother's perfume, and soft as marshmallows.

That evening, that sureness, feels ancient now, like something grown small with the distance of years.

enough, we had enough time, any of this was enough?

O que tornava algo precioso? Perder e encontrar.

For Mia, Moody learned, did not consider herself a photographer. Photography, at its heart, was about documentation, and he soon understood that for Mia photography was simply a tool, which she used as a painter might use a brush or a knife.

I keep a writer's notebook and also put all my daily schedules and to-do lists in it.

One of the most fun things for me, as a writer, is when readers ask questions like, 'Oh, I noticed that you have a lot of water and baptism imagery in your book. Did you do that on purpose?'

My parents used books as bribes: if I got straight A's on my report card, they would buy me one book. This was completely unnecessary, as I always got A's, and they bought me books all the time anyway, and we all knew it.