377 Quotes by Celeste Ng

Did you not understand me? You need me to speak in Ebonics?

If men ever got periods, believe me, you’d all be in a ball on the ground from cramps.

How did you explain to someone – how did you explain to a child, a child you loved – that someone they adored was not to be trusted? She.

Lydia, five years old, standing on tiptoe to watch vinegar and baking soda foam in the sink. Lydia tugging a heavy book from the shelf, saying, “Show me again, show me another.” Lydia, touching the stethoscope, ever so gently, to her mother’s heart. Tears blur Marilyn’s sight. It had not been science that Lydia had loved.

How good the rain would feel, like crying all over her body.

She replaces the phone number on the board, her damp fingers smudging the ink so that the digits blur as if in a strong wind, or underwater.

Rules existed for a reason: if you followed them, you would succeed; if you didn’t, you might burn the world to the ground.

Nath had just started the first grade, Lydia had just started nursery school, Hannah had not yet even been imagined. For the first time since she’d been married, Marilyn found herself unoccupied. She was twenty-nine years old, still young, still slender. Still smart, she thought. She could go back to school now, at last, and finish her degree. Do everything she’d planned before the children came along. Only now she couldn’t remember how to write a paper, how.

Dinnertime comes and goes, but none of them can imagine eating. It seems like something only people in films do, something lovely and decorative, that whole act of raising a fork to your mouth. Some kind of purposeless ceremony.