Top 67 Celeste Ng Quotes
#1. 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
Celeste Ng
#2. 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.
Celeste Ng
#3. She drove on into the night, homeward, her hair weeping tiny slow streams down her back.
Celeste Ng
#4. If you told people you were moving to Ohio, they wouldn't congratulate you. They'd say "OH WHY would you move there?" as if that was something that happened to you and you had to deal with.
Celeste Ng
#5. 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.
Celeste Ng
#6. She did not know how to explain what happened, how everything has changed in just one day, how someone she loved so dearly could be there one minute, and the next minute: gone.
Celeste Ng
#7. There is something about Midwest in general, that has kind of an underdog quality.
Celeste Ng
#8. 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.
Celeste Ng
#9. There is nowhere to go but on. Still, part of her longs to go back for one instant - not to change anything, not even to speak to Lydia, not to tell her anything at all. Just to open the door and see her daughter there, asleep, one more time, and know all was well.
Celeste Ng
#10. Lydia has never really had friends, but their parents have never known.
Celeste Ng
#11. Hannah, as if she understood her place in the cosmos, grew from quiet infant to watchful child: a child fond of nooks and corners, who curled up in closets, behind sofas, under dangling tablecloths, staying out of sight as well as out of mind, to ensure the terrain of the family did not change.
Celeste Ng
#12. If a news camera shows up, people will line up, they want to be seen. But at the same time they want both to be chosen and not singled out. I think that is an endless struggle within most.
Celeste Ng
#13. this was the first reason he came to love her: because she had blended in so perfectly, because she had seemed so completely and utterly at home.
Celeste Ng
#14. 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.
Celeste Ng
#15. 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.
Celeste Ng
#16. This is it, Marilyn told herself. Let it
go. This is what you have. Accept it.
Celeste Ng
#17. 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.
Celeste Ng
#18. Being asked, "Where are you REALLY from?" makes one feel OTHERED.
Celeste Ng
#19. At least I know who I am. What I want,
Celeste Ng
#20. I'd like to think of my self as not melancholic at all, I think I'm a pretty cheerful person, really.
Celeste Ng
#21. 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
Celeste Ng
#22. A few people insisted that the Cape-to-Cairo Railroad was in Europe. For college students, they have surprising trouble with geography.
Celeste Ng
#23. 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.
Celeste Ng
#24. 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.
Celeste Ng
#25. 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.
Celeste Ng
#26. 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.
Celeste Ng
#27. Morning sun fills the house, creamy as lemon chiffon, lighting the insides of cupboards and empty closets and clean, bare floors.
Celeste Ng
#28. 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.
Celeste Ng
#29. 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.
Celeste Ng
#31. 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.
Celeste Ng
#32. 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.
Celeste Ng
#33. 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
Celeste Ng
#34. Dreaming of his future, he no longer heard all the things she did not say.
Celeste Ng
#35. In the dark they are careful of each other, as if they know they are fragile, as if they know they can break.
Celeste Ng
#36. 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.
Celeste Ng
#37. It will be all right, she told herself, and she stepped out of the boat into the water.
Celeste Ng
#38. 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.
Celeste Ng
#39. As if they were two halves of a mold. He
Celeste Ng
#40. People decide what you're like before they even get to know you
Celeste Ng
#41. the night before? He had been away four whole
Celeste Ng
#42. condolences; a few of them pat Hannah on the head, as if she's
Celeste Ng
#43. I am very active on Twitter and one thing that keeps popping up is "How do I balance having a kid and writing?" And I know it should not be as aggravating, but I know no one ever asks a male writer that. Or, any male that.
Celeste Ng
#44. 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.
Celeste Ng
#45. Irony: a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things,
Celeste Ng
#46. She will figure out what happened to Lydia. She will find out who is responsible. She will find out what went wrong.
Celeste Ng
#47. 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.
Celeste Ng
#48. After a while, the fear became a habit, too.
Celeste Ng
#49. 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.
Celeste Ng
#50. She understands. There is nowhere to go but on. Still, part of her longs to go back
Celeste Ng
#51. 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.
Celeste Ng
#52. 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.
Celeste Ng
#53. 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.
Celeste Ng
#54. The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you--whether because you didn't get to have your say, or because the other person never got to hear you and really wanted to.
Celeste Ng
#55. What made something precious? Losing it and finding it.
Celeste Ng
#56. 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.
Celeste Ng
#57. 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.
Celeste Ng
#58. It's too late. He's already learned how not to drown.
Celeste Ng
#59. He can guess, but he won't ever know, not really. What it was like, what she was thinking, everything she'd never told him. Whether she thought he'd failed her, or whether she wanted him to let her go. This, more than anything, makes him feel that she is gone.
Celeste Ng
#60. 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.
Celeste Ng
#61. 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.
Celeste Ng
#62. 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.
Celeste Ng
#63. 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.
Celeste Ng
#64. You never got what you wanted; you just learned to get by without it.
Celeste Ng
#65. When you mention to people growing up in Cleveland they bring up the river catching on fire, or LeBron James leaving, they have these references, but no one imagines ending up there.
Celeste Ng
#66. Before that she hadn't realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.
Celeste Ng
#67. The intricate gears of her mind ticking silently at no one, thoughts pinging the closed windows like a trapped bee. p. 251
Celeste Ng
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