18 Quotes by Alice Pung

Life is nothing but high school.” – Kurt Vonnegut.

I’d seen how the top-performing girls at Laurinda were cultivated like hothouse strawberries – bright and lush. Out in the real world, they would bruise. I wanted to see how the Cabinet would cope in two years’ time, when they would be in the same classes as my most driven and hard-working Christ Our Saviour friends, and the most tenacious and gifted public school students, the hardy banksias and olive trees and root vegetables that would last all through winter.

I never tell them about our lives. You know why? It is not because I am ashamed. It is because some things are just good, too good to be judged.

In their white-daisy bouquet of slim pickings, they cast out all the yellow chrysanthemums, and anything brown was considered wilted.

I’d never been much good at finding openings in conversations here. I treated them like stuffing envelopes- the moment a gap appeared, I was worried I’d insert the wrong thing and it would sealed and delivered. Or I’d insert something too large to fit through the post, and it would not be accepted.

To be part of the Cabinet, I’d had to keep my true self apart. and there’s only so much of yourself you can hide, Linh, before you start to fall apart.

All teenagers are drama queens inside their minds, even the mousiest of us. We load and reload movies of ourselves in heroic postures and outlandish triumphs, movies that if they were ever to be played in front of an audience of people we know and love, would cause us to shrivel in shame.

As a general rule, teenage girls never, ever see solitude as a choice.

People, even well-intentioned people, were always trying to take away our quiet little successes and joys and replace them with big, overarching fears.