377 Quotes by Celeste Ng

It has been so long since he thought of his wife as a creature of want.

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.

Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over. They find a way.

There was an ease between them that, Moody was sure, could only come from being intimately comfortable with another person’s body.

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.

His life had been divided into a before and an after, and he would always be comparing the two.

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.

Every bedroom was empty except for the smell of gasoline and a small crackling fire set directly in the middle of each bed, as if a demented Girl Scout had been camping there.

She had learned that when people were bent on doing something they believed was a good deed, it was usually impossible to dissuade them.