Lisa Ko Quotes

The boat rocked in the waves, and as I saw the lights of Kowloon come through the fog, I held the railing, breathless. How wrong I had been to assume this feeling had been lost forever. This lightheaded uncertainty, all my fear and joy - I could return here, punching the sky. Because I had found her: Polly Guo. Wherever I went next, I would never let her go again... The water was Minjiang, New York, Fuzhou, but most of all, it was you.

So I'd grown up eating my words, and it wasn't until later that that I realized how many had gotten backed up inside me. In the factory dorm, sentences spilled out of me like a broken faucet, and when I moved even further away and saw children splashing into rivers spurting from fire hydrants, water pouring into the streets like it was endless, I would see my younger self in that hydrant, but tugged open, a hungry stream.

If he could just talk to his mother in person, maybe he could figure out who he should be.

Never had there been a time when sound, color, and feeling hadn't been intertwined, when a dirty, rolling bass line hadn't induced violets that suffused him with thick contentment, when the shades of certain chords sliding up to one another hadn't produced dusty pastels that made him feel like he was cupping a tiny, golden bird. It wasn't just music but also rumbling trains and rainstorms, occasional voices, a collective din. Colors and textures appeared in front of him, bouncing in time to the rhythm, or he'd get a flash of color in his mind, an automatic sensation of a tone, innate as breathing.

The book says in two months we can be speaking at a third grade level.'
'Third grade? That's for kids. Baby level.'
'If you don't try you'll be speaking at fetus level. Silent.

My father used to say women yapped too much, that some women would be better off not talking at all. So I'd grown up eating my words, and it wasn't until later that I realized how many had gotten backed up inside me.

I want you to know that you were wanted. I decided: I wanted you.

Yi Ba thought that only men could do what they wanted, but he was wrong. I stood with my toes in the ocean, euphoric at how far I had come, and two months later, when I gave birth to you, I would feel accomplished, tougher than any man.

He basked in her barbed teasing, recalled her toughest, more resilient love. How different it was from Kay's exposed emotions. His mother had never demanded his reassurance.

The sky was so clear and blue, so striking in its stillness, that I wanted to cry.

Everyone had stories they told themselves to get through the days.

It was home, a home, but he knew he would have to leave here, too.

Maybe it wasn't about the moving to new places, but about the challenge of staying put.