Quotes from Celeste Ng

Teens could pay attention to nothing but the sexuality billowing off each other like steam.

What made something precious? Losing it and finding it. All those times he'd pretended to lose her. He sinks down on the carpet, dizzy with loss.

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. He wonders if it is his father.

and Mia realized that she was crossing into a place she would have to go alone.

If men ever got periods, believe me, you'd all be in a ball on the ground from cramps.

Too unpatriotic, right, to tell you the horrible things our country's done before. The camps at Manzanar, or what happens at the border. They probably teach you that most plantation owners were kind to their slaves and that Columbus discovered America, don't they?

There was an ease between them that, Moody was sure, could only come from being intimately comfortable with another person's body.

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.

abortions were an action of last resort, when there was no better option.

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.

The intricate gears of her mind ticking silently at no one, thoughts pinging the closed windows like a trapped bee.

Once she was behind, how could she catch up?

wasn't until he heard the horror in the teacher's voice—"Shirley Byron!"—that he realized he was supposed to be embarrassed; the next time it happened, he had learned his lesson and turned red right away. In

Because more than anything, her mother had wanted to stand out; because more than anything, her father had wanted to blend in. Because those things had been impossible. In

At last she turned to the only source she could think of: her mother. Her mother was a journalist, at least in name. True, her mother mostly covered small stories, but journalists found things out.

She could not, she had thought as she bent to kiss the baby's flushed cheek, have loved this child more if it had come from her own flesh.

In the books she read, every stream might be a river god, every tree a dryad in disguise, every old woman a powerful fairy, every pebble an enchanted soul. Anything had the potential to transform, and this, to her, seemed the true meaning of art.

No sign of her anywhere here. Signs of her everywhere here.

There is a long history, in the U.S. and elsewhere, of removing children as a means of political control.

Where do we follow the rules, and where do we justify breaking them? Do our pasts determine what we deserve in the future? And is it ever possible to leave your past behind?

All she has left are things unwanted, things unloved.

They had assumed this photography thing was an adolescent phase, like boy chasing, or vegetarianism. What else had they worked so hard for all these years? For Mia to throw their money away on art school?

You loved so hard and hoped so much and then you ended up with nothing. Children who no longer needed you. A husband who no longer wanted you. Nothing left but you, alone, and empty space. With

We don't burn our books, she says. We pulp them. Much more civilized, right? Mash them up, recycle them into toilet paper. Those books wiped someone's rear end a long time ago.