Quotes from Celeste Ng

She remembered then that Lexie, thank god, had stayed over at Serena Wong's house last night.

When are you ever done with the story of someone you love? You turn the most precious of your memories over and over, wearing their edges smooth, warming them again with your heat. You touch the curves and hollows of every detail you have, memorizing them, reciting them once more though you already know them in your bones. 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?

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. It made your head spin.

It was too big to talk about, what had happened. It was like a landscape they could not see all at once; it was like the sky at night, which turned and turned so they couldn't find its edges. It would always feel too big. He pushed her in. And then he pulled her out. All her life, Lydia would remember one thing. All his life, Nath would remember another.

Did you not understand me? You need me to speak in Ebonics?

Change doesn't just happen," her mother had always said, echoing the Shaker motto. "It has to be planned.

She had felt, finally, as if she could speak without immediately bumping into the hard shell of her sheltered life, as if she suddenly saw that the solid walls penning her in were actually bars, with spaces between them wide enough to slip through.

Like after a prairie fire. I saw one, years ago, when we were in Nebraska. It seems like the end of the world. The earth is all scorched and black and everything green is gone. But after the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow." She held Izzy at arm's length, wiped her cheek with a fingertip, smoothed her hair one last time. "People are like that, too, you know. They start over. They find a way.

It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?)

This is it, Marilyn told herself. Let it go. This is what you have. Accept it.

They never discussed it, but both came to understand it as a promise: he would always make sure there was a place for her. She would always be

Mia was affectionate but never effusive; Pearl had never seen her mother embrace anyone other than her.

Unconsciously, one hand crept down to her belly, where an ache was beginning to blossom.

Lexie was used to people wanting her opinion, to the point where she often assumed they did and just hadn't quite said so.

Nath had just started the first grade, Lydia had just started nursery school, Hannah had not yet even been imagined. For the first time since she'd been married, Marilyn found herself unoccupied. She was twenty-nine years old, still young, still slender. Still smart, she thought. She could go back to school now, at last, and finish her degree. Do everything she'd planned before the children came along. Only now she couldn't remember how to write a paper, how

Here, she found, everything had nuance; everything had an unrevealed side or unexplored depths.

Let's pretend," he says, "that you never met me. That she was never born. That none of this ever happened." Then he is gone.

Beautiful women. The world, at that time, was full of them, all of them furiously incandescent like dying stars.

Sex changed things, she realized-not just between you and the other person, but between you and everyone.

She had felt, finally, as if she could speak without immediately bumping into the hard shell of her sheltered life, as it she suddenly saw that the solid walls penning her in were actually bars, with spaces between them wide enough to slip through.

Today it strikes Bird as unbearably sad, to pass by and leave no trace of your existence. To

But she did not know how to explain what had happened, how everything had changed in just one day, how someone she loved so dearly could be there one minute, and the next minute: gone.

Mia] didn't care, Mrs. Richardson realized, what people thought of her. In a way, that made her dangerous.

All her life, she had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing...It scaled walls and jumped over trenches. Sparks leapt like fleas and spread as rapidly; a breeze could carry embers for miles.