Celeste Ng Quotes

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.

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

It terrifies you. That you missed out on something. That you gave up something you didn't know you wanted." A sharp, pitying smile pinched the corners of her lips. "What was it? Was it a boy? Was it a vocation? Or was it a whole life?

For the rest of the summer, and for years after that, they will grope for the words that say what they mean: to Nath, to Hannah, to each other. There is so much more they need to say.

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

condolences; a few of them pat Hannah on the head, as if she's

In the dark they are careful of each other, as if they know they are fragile, as if they know they can break.

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.

It had not been science that Lydia had loved. And then, as if the tears are telescopes, she begins to see more clearly: the shredded posters and pictures, the rubble of books, the shelf prostrate at her feet. Everything that she had wanted for Lydia, which Lydia had never wanted but had embraced anyway. A dull chill creeps over her. Perhaps - and this thought chokes her - that had dragged Lydia underwater at last.

All of that will be gone by morning. Instead, they will dissect this last evening for years to come. What had they missed that they should have seen? What small gesture, forgotten, might have changed everything? They will pick it down to the bones, wondering how this had all gone so wrong, and they will never be sure.

I am in a mixed race marriage myself, and I have a mixed race son ... The racial perception interest is probably always going to be there to some extent.

Ed Lim had gone to four different toy stores searching... he would have bought it for his daughter, whatever the price.

Dreaming of his future, he no longer heard all the things she did not say.

Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn't look like everyone else. In homeroom or at the drugstore or at the supermarket, you listened to morning announcements or dropped off a roll of film or picked up a carton of eggs and felt like just another someone in the crowd. Sometimes you didn't think about it at all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again.

We're committed, as she gets older, to teaching her about her birth culture. And of course she already loves the rice. Actually, it was her first solid food.

After a while, the fear became a habit, too.

Everyone in the Richardson family noticed Izzy's improved demeanor. "She's almost pleasant around you," Lexie told Mia one day. Izzy's adoration for Mia, like everything she did, did not come by halves: there was nothing Izzy wouldn't do for her.

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.

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.

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 existed all at once.

To those out on their own paths, setting little fires.

But the problem with rules, he reflected, was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time there were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure which side of the line you stood on.

When a long, long time later, he stares down at the silent blue marble of the earth and thinks of his sister, as he will at every important moment of his life. He doesn't know this yet, but he senses it deep down in his core. So much will happen, he thinks, that I would want to tell you.

There is something about Midwest in general, that has kind of an underdog quality.

How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia's mother and father, because of her mother's and father's mothers and fathers.

I think this is something that is naturally built in in people, a need for attention and a need to be special and we are always trying to find a balance.

In kindegarten, he had learned how to make a bruise stop hurting: you pressed it over and over with your thumb. the first times it hurt so much your eyes watered. The second time it hurt a little less. The tenth time, it was barely an ache.

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

For moving would never have been enough; he sees that now. It would have been the same anywhere. Children of Mixed Backgrounds Often Struggle to Find Their Place.

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.

She smelled of home...as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person whom she'd carried alongside her.

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.

You could stop taking their phone calls, tear up their letters, pretend they'd never existed. Start over as a new person with a new life. Just a problem of geography, he thought, with the confidence of someone who had never yet tried to free himself of family.

I mean, that's the future, isn't it? In the future we'll all be able to look past race.

as her mother promised to teach them everything a young lady needed to keep a house. As if, Marilyn thought, it might run away when you weren't looking.

You don't feel like smiling? Then what? Force yourself to smile. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy.

Marilyn smiled back, a fake smile. The same one she had given to her mother all those years. You lifted the corners of your mouth toward your ears.
You kept your lips closed. It was amazing how no one could tell.

He had forgotten that anything could be so tender. He breaks the bun open, revealing glossy bits of pork and glaze, a secret red heart.

When he puts it to his mouth, it is like a kiss: sweet and salty and warm.

Rules existed for a reason: if you followed them, you would succeed; if you didn't, you might burn the world to the ground.

The people are maybe still as aware of the differences but they are more accepting of it that what we saw in the 70s and 80s, but the undercurrent is still there. There are maybe no racial slurs anymore, no firecrackers in mailboxes, the distinction is much more subtle.

It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds core, and all.

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

Lydia, five years old, standing on tiptoe to watch vinegar and baking soda foam in the sink. Lydia tugging a heavy book from the shelf, saying, "Show me again, show me another." Lydia, touching the stethoscope, ever so gently, to her mother's heart. Tears blur Marilyn's sight. It had not been science that Lydia had loved

the night before? He had been away four whole

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.

Everyone sees race, Lex," said Moody. "The only difference is who pretends not to.

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

How he'd asked for a telescope for his fourteenth birthday and received a clock radio instead; how he'd saved his allowance and bought himself one. How, sometimes, at dinner, Nath never said a word about his day, because their parents never asked.

You never got what you wanted; you just learned to get by without it.

Over the past two weeks she's worked her way through it [the book], a little each night, savoring the words like a cherry Life Saver tucked inside her cheek.

The intricate gears of her mind ticking silently at no one, thoughts pinging the closed windows like a trapped bee. p. 251

The photos stirred feelings she couldn't quite frame in words, and this, she decided, must mean they were true works of art.

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

Before that she hadn't realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.

She replaces the phone number on the board, her damp fingers smudging the ink so that the digits blur as if in a strong wind, or underwater.

She had spent the night planning and now that it was time, she hardly thought at all. It was as if she were standing outside herself, watching someone else do these things.

Her preferred form of exercise, she told Wendy, was stress. "Clench muscles, hold for twelve hours, release for a count of five, then clench again

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.

By tomorrow Marilyn would forget this moment: Lydia's shout, the shattered edges in her tone. It would disappear forever from her memory of Lydia, the way memories of a lost loved one always smooth and simplify themselves, shedding complexity like scales.

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

I would never tell myself, you have to write 20 pages today or something. But I do try to show up. Read what I wrote, fix things.

A few people insisted that the Cape-to-Cairo Railroad was in Europe. For college students, they have surprising trouble with geography.

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

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

She had scooped Lydia up and smoothed her hair and told her how clever she was, how proud her father would be when he came home. But she'd felt as if she'd found a locked door in a familiar room: Lydia, still small enough to cradle, had secrets. Marilyn might feed her and bathe her and coax her legs into pajama pants, but already parts of her life were curtained off. She kissed Lydia's cheek and pulled her close, trying to warm herself against her daughter's small body.

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

It would disappear forever from her memory of Lydia, the way memories of a lost loved one always smooth and simplify themselves, shedding complexities like scales.

Like after a prairie fire...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....People are like that, too, you know. They start over. They find a way.

I'd like to think of my self as not melancholic at all, I think I'm a pretty cheerful person, really.

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

Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.

As if they were two halves of a mold. He

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

Ed Lim's daughter, Monique, was a junior now, but as she'd grown up, he and his wife had noted with dismay that there were no dolls that looked like her. At ten, Monique had begun poring over a mail-order doll catalog as if it were a book–expensive dolls, with n ames and stories and historical outfits, absurdly detailed and even more absurdly expensive.
'Jenny Cohen has this one,' she'd told them, her finger tracing the outline of a blond doll that did indeed resemble Jenny Cohen: sweet faced with heavy bangs, slightly stocky. 'And they just made a new one with red hair. Her mom's getting it for her sister Sarah for Hannukkah.' Sarah Cohen had flaming red hair, the color of a penny in the summer sun. But there was no doll with black hair, let alone a face that looked anything like Monique's. Ed Lim had gone to four different toy stores searching for a Chinese doll; he would have bought it for his daughter, whatever the price, but no such thing existed.
He'd gone so far as to write to Mattel, asking them if there was a Chinese Barbie doll, and they'd replied that yes, they offered 'Oriental Barbie' and sent him a pamphlet. He had looked at that pamphlet for a long time, at the Barbie's strange mishmash of a costume, all red and gold satin and like nothing he'd ever seen on a Chinese or Japanese or Korean woman, at her waist-length black hair and slanted eyes. I am from Hong Kong, the pamphlet ran. It is in the Orient, or Far East. Throughout the Orient, people shop a

Every time she kissed him, every time he opened his arms and she crawled into them, felt like a miracle. Coming to her made him feel perfectly welcomed, perfectly at home, as he had never in his life felt before.

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.

Have a good night,' he said, and Mia stepped out onto Fifth Avenue and let the city swallow her up.

But at that moment she had known, with a certainty she would never feel about anything else in her life, that it was right, that she wanted this man in her life. Something inside her said, He understands. What it's like to be different.

Being asked, "Where are you REALLY from?" makes one feel OTHERED.

James slid into his seat and the girl next to him asked, "What's wrong with your eyes?" It 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.

People decide what you're like before they even get to know you

It will be all right, she told herself, and she stepped out of the boat into the water.

Was she sad? She was angry. Furious at the smallness of her mother's life.

She did not even have words, only a feeling, a terrible hollow feeling, as if everything inside her had been scooped out raw.

...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.

It was as if instead of entering a house she was entering the idea of a house, some archetype brought to life here before her. Something she'd only heard about but never seen.

She recognized it at once: love, one-way deep adoration that bounced off and did not bounce back; careful, quiet love that didn't care and went on anyway.

At least I know who I am. What I want,

What made something precious? Losing it and finding it.

Most communities just happen; the best are planned.

He enjoys the surprise on people's faces when he tells them he's a professor of American history. "Well, I am American," he says when people blink, a barb of defensiveness in his tone. Someone

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 able to say, Someone is coming. I am not alone.

Don't ever smile if you don't want to," she said, and Hannah, half-blinded by the spotlight of Lydia's whole attention, nodded. "Remember that.

Like small animals sheltered deep in their den

It's too late. He's already learned how not to drown.

All up and down the street the houses looked like any others - but inside them were people who might be happy, or taking refuge, or steeling themselves to go out into the world, searching for something better. So many lives she would never know about, unfolding behind those doors.

Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over. They find a way.

She will figure out what happened to Lydia. She will find out who is responsible. She will find out what went wrong.

She understands. There is nowhere to go but on. Still, part of her longs to go back