Top 200 Celeste Ng Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Maybe at birth everyone should be given to a family of a different race to be raised. Maybe that would solve racism once and for all.”

— Celeste Ng

2. “You’ll always be sad about this,” Mia said softly. “But it doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice. It’s just something that you have to carry.”

— Celeste Ng

3. “It was so easy, she thought with some disdain, to find out about people. It was all out there, everything about them. You just had to look. You could figure out anything about a person if you just tried hard enough.”

— Celeste Ng

4. “Most of the time, everyone deserves more than one chance. We all do things we regret now and then. You just have to carry them with you.”

— Celeste Ng

5. “He can guess, but he won’t ever know, not really. What it was like, what she was thinking, everything she’d never told him. Whether she thought he’d failed her, or whether she wanted him to let her go. This, more than anything, makes him feel that she is gone.”

— Celeste Ng

6. “Because more than anything, her mother had wanted to stand out; because more than anything, her father had wanted to blend in. Because those things had been impossible.”

— Celeste Ng

7. “What made something precious? Losing it and finding it. All those times he’d pretended to lose her.”

— Celeste Ng

8. “Beautiful women. The world, at that time, was full of them, all of them furiously incandescent like dying stars.”

— Celeste Ng

9. “She had learned, with Izzy’s birth, how your life could trundle along on its safe little track and then, with no warning, skid spectacularly off course. Every time Mrs. Richardson looked at Izzy, that feeling of things spiraling out of control coiled around her again, like a muscle she didn’t know how to unclench.”

— Celeste Ng

10. “It bothers you, doesn’t it?” Mia said suddenly. “I think you can’t imagine. Why anyone would choose a different life from the one you’ve got. Why anyone might want something other than a big house with a big lawn, a fancy car, a job in an office. Why anyone would choose anything different than what you’d choose.”

— Celeste Ng

11. “What made something precious? Losing it and finding it. All those times he’d pretended to lose her. He sinks down on the carpet, dizzy with loss.”

— Celeste Ng

12. “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.”

— Celeste Ng

13. “Mrs. Richardson, however, could not let Izzy be, and the feeling coalesced in all of them: Izzy pushing, her mother restraining, and after a time no one could remember how the dynamic had started, only that it had existed always.”

— Celeste Ng

14. “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.”

— Celeste Ng

15. “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.”

— Celeste Ng

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

— Celeste Ng

17. “You loved so hard and hoped so much and then you ended up with nothing. Children who no longer needed you. A husband who no longer wanted you. Nothing left but you, alone, and empty space.”

— Celeste Ng

18. “The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you.”

— Celeste Ng

19. “The writer’s job, after all, is not to dictate meaning, but to give the reader enough pieces to create his or her own satisfying meaning. The story is truly finished – and meaning is made – not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters the story and fills that little ambiguous space, completing the circuit, letting the power flow through.”

— Celeste Ng

20. “It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?”

— Celeste Ng

21. “That long-ago day, sitting in this very spot on the dock, she had already begun to feel it: how hard it would be to inherit their parents’ dreams. How suffocating to be so loved.”

— Celeste Ng

22. “It terrifies you. That you missed out on something. That you gave up something you didn’t know you wanted.” A sharp, pitying smile pinched the corners of her lips. “What was it? Was it a boy? Was it a vocation? Or was it a whole life?”

— Celeste Ng

23. “To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once.”

— Celeste Ng

24. “You don’t feel like smiling? Then what? Force yourself to smile. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy.”

— Celeste Ng

25. “The firemen said there were little fires everywhere,” Lexie said. “Multiple points of origin. Possible use of accelerant. Not an accident.”

— Celeste Ng

26. “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.”

— Celeste Ng

27. “To those out on their own paths, setting little fires.”

— Celeste Ng

28. “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.”

— Celeste Ng

29. “I’ll tell you a secret. A lot of times, parents are not the best at seeing their children clearly.”

— Celeste Ng

30. “Before that she hadn’t realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.”

— Celeste Ng

31. “Every time she kissed him, every time he opened his arms and she crawled into them, felt like a miracle. Coming to her made him feel perfectly welcomed, perfectly at home, as he had never in his life felt before.”

— Celeste Ng

32. “What made something precious? Losing it and finding it.”

— Celeste Ng

33. “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.”

— Celeste Ng

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

— Celeste Ng

35. “Change doesn’t just happen,” her mother had always said, echoing the Shaker motto. “It has to be planned.”

— Celeste Ng

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

— Celeste Ng

37. “He pushed her in. And then he pulled her out. All her life, Lydia would remember one thing. All his life, Nath would remember another.”

— Celeste Ng

38. “I don’t have a plan, I’m afraid, but then, no one really does, no matter what they say.”

— Celeste Ng

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

— Celeste Ng

40. “You never got what you wanted; you just learned to get by without it.”

— Celeste Ng

41. “It would disappear forever from her memory of Lydia, the way memories of a lost loved one always smooth and simplify themselves, shedding complexities like scales.”

— Celeste Ng

42. “She smelled of home... as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person whom she’d carried alongside her.”

— Celeste Ng

43. “Dreaming of his future, he no longer heard all the things she did not say.”

— Celeste Ng

44. “Everyone in the Richardson family noticed Izzy’s improved demeanor. “She’s almost pleasant around you,” Lexie told Mia one day. Izzy’s adoration for Mia, like everything she did, did not come by halves: there was nothing Izzy wouldn’t do for her.”

— Celeste Ng

45. “It had not been science that Lydia had loved. And then, as if the tears are telescopes, she begins to see more clearly: the shredded posters and pictures, the rubble of books, the shelf prostrate at her feet. Everything that she had wanted for Lydia, which Lydia had never wanted but had embraced anyway. A dull chill creeps over her. Perhaps – and this thought chokes her – that had dragged Lydia underwater at last.”

— Celeste Ng

46. “Sometimes, just when you think everything’s gone, you find a way.” Mia racked her mind for an explanation. “Like after a prairie fire. I saw one, years ago, when we were in Nebraska. It seems like the end of the world. The earth is all scorched and black and everything green is gone. But after the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow.”

— Celeste Ng

47. “Lydia has never really had friends, but their parents have never known.”

— Celeste Ng

48. “She recognized it at once: love, one-way deep adoration that bounced off and did not bounce back; careful, quiet love that didn’t care and went on anyway.”

— Celeste Ng

49. “She understands. There is nowhere to go but on. Still, part of her longs to go back.”

— Celeste Ng

50. “Don’t ever smile if you don’t want to,” she said, and Hannah, half-blinded by the spotlight of Lydia’s whole attention, nodded. “Remember that.”

— Celeste Ng