7 Quotes by Angie Kim

Tragedies don't inoculate you against further tragedies, and misfortune doesn't get sprinkled out in fair proportions; bad things get hurled at you in clumps and batches, unmanageable and messy.

Win or lose, she’d still have the same billable earnings, same house, same family, whereas for Elizabeth, the trial’s outcome meant the difference between suburbia and death row.

But that was the way life worked. Every human being was the result of a million different factors mixing together - one of a million sperm arriving at the egg at exactly a certain time; even a millisecond off, and another entirely different person would result. Good things and bad - every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness - resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.

Rosa's death would have destroyed her, demolished her life. But she would have had the luxury of finality, of lowering the coffin and saying goodbye. And eventually, she'd have risen and rebuilt her life. This way, she was left standing, but in a purgatory state of descent, being whittled away, bit by bit, day by day. Was that better? "What mother thinks this way?" Teresa said.

Good things and bad—every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness—resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.

That was the thing about lies: they demanded commitment. Once you lied, you had to stick to your story.

Having a special-needs child didn’t just change you; it transmuted you, transported you to a parallel world with an altered gravitational axis.