377 Quotes by Celeste Ng

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

No one, she had learned from experience, could stand such silence for long. If you waited long enough, someone would start talking, and more often than not they would give you a chance to press further, to crack the conversation open and scoop out what you needed to know.

The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart. 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.

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.

A lifetime of practical and comfortable considerations settled atop the spark inside her like a thick, heavy blanket.

But 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. So in the end I’d probably just frustrate us both.” She.

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.

The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart.

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.