Quotes from Celeste Ng

Nearly two decades later, others would raise this question, would talk about books as mirrors and windows, and Ed Lim, tired by then, would find himself as frustrated as he was grateful. We've always known, he would think; what took you so long?

Irony: a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things,

What made something precious? Losing it and finding it. All those times he'd pretended to lose her.

Everything, she had come to understand, was something like infinity.

I could have done that, Marilyn thought. And the words clicked into place like puzzle pieces, shocking her in their rightness. The hypothetical past-perfect. The tense of missed chances. Tears dripped down her chin. No! She though suddenly. I could do that.

That long-ago day, sitting in this very spot on the dock, she had already begun to feel it: how hard it would be to inherit their parents' dreams. How suffocating to be so loved.

And Lydia herself—the reluctant center of their universe—every day, she held the world together. She absorbed her parents' dreams, quieting the reluctance that bubbled up within.

If we fear something, it is all the more imperative we study it thoroughly.

Librarians, of all people, understood the value of knowing, even if that information could not yet be used.

Who ever thinks, recalling the face of the one they loved who is gone: yes, I looked at you enough, I loved you enough, we had enough time, any of this was enough?

Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less.

Asian men could be socially inept and incompetent and ridiculous, like a Long Duk Dong, or at best unthreatening and slightly buffoonish, like a Jackie Chan. They were not allowed to be angry and articulate and powerful. And possibly right, Mr. Richardson thought uneasily.

The writer's job, after all, is not to dictate meaning, but to give the reader enough pieces to create his or her own satisfying meaning. The story is truly finished—and meaning is made—not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters the story and fills that little ambiguous space, completing the circuit, letting the power flow through.

Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast.

Journalists," she explained in a civics speech about dream careers, "chronicle our everyday lives. They reveal truths and information that the public deserves to know, and they provide a record for posterity, so that future generations can learn from our mistakes and improve upon our achievements.

But the thing about portraits is, you need to show people the way they want to be seen. And I prefer to show people as I see them. So in the end I'd probably just frustrate us both." She

How did you explain to someone—how did you explain to a child, a child you loved—that someone they adored was not to be trusted? She

If a soul could leave the body, she thought, this is the sound it would make: like the screech of a nail being pulled from old wood.

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.

At the Richardson house were overstuffed sofas so deep you could sink into them as if into a bubble bath. Credenzas. Heavy sleigh beds. Once you owned an enormous chair like this, Pearl thought, you would simply have to stay put. You would have to plant roots and make the place that held this chair your home.

His job was to make losses feel smaller. But the students never turned their C-minuses into Bs; new funding never materialized. You never got what you wanted; you just learned to get by without it.

I have measured my life with coffee spoons and do I dare to eat a peach?' 'DO I DARE DISTURB THE UNIVERSE?

Though she would never quite articulate it this way, resentment began to sheathe concern. ANGER IS FEAR'S BODYGUARD, a poster in the hospital hard read, but Mrs. Richardson had never noticed it; she was too busy thinking, It wasn't supposed to happen this way.

Part of the process," Pearl informed him as they cut through the living room, with the nonchalant air of a native unfazed by the curious customs of the land.