Top 200 Celeste Ng Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “All her life, she had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing. It so easily went out of control. It scaled walls and jumped over trenches. Sparks leapt like fleas and spread as rapidly; a breeze could carry embers for miles. Better to control that spark and pass it carefully from one generation to the next, like an Olympic torch. Or, perhaps, to tend it carefully like an eternal flame: a reminder of light and goodness that would never – could never – set anything ablaze. Carefully controlled. Domesticated. Happy in captivity. The key, she thought, was to avoid conflagration.”

— Celeste Ng

102. “You can’t just do what you want, she thought. Why should Mia get to, when no one else did?”

— Celeste Ng

103. “Like after a prairie fire... 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... People are like that, too, you know. They start over. They find a way.”

— Celeste Ng

104. “Mia held her for a moment, buried her nose in the part of Pearl’s hair. Every time she did this, she was comforted by how Pearl smelled exactly the same. She smelled, Mia thought suddenly, 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

105. “By tomorrow Marilyn would forget this moment: Lydia’s shout, the shattered edges in her tone. It would disappear forever from her memory of Lydia, the way memories of a lost loved one always smooth and simplify themselves, shedding complexity like scales.”

— Celeste Ng

106. “All of that will be gone by morning. Instead, they will dissect this last evening for years to come. What had they missed that they should have seen? What small gesture, forgotten, might have changed everything? They will pick it down to the bones, wondering how this had all gone so wrong, and they will never be sure.”

— Celeste Ng

107. “Was she sad? She was angry. Furious at the smallness of her mother’s life.”

— Celeste Ng

108. “But the problem with rules, he reflected, was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time there were simply ways...”

— Celeste Ng

109. “Here, she found, everything had nuance; everything had an unrevealed side or unexplored depths.”

— Celeste Ng

110. “If a soul could leave the body, she thought, this is the sound it would make: like the screech of a nail being pulled from old wood.”

— Celeste Ng

111. “She will figure out what happened to Lydia. She will find out who is responsible. She will find out what went wrong.”

— Celeste Ng

112. “The intricate gears of her mind ticking silently at no one, thoughts pinging the closed windows like a trapped bee. p. 251.”

— Celeste Ng

113. “In her experience, when someone tried to do something for her, it came from either pity or distrust, but this simple gesture felt like what it was: a small kindness, with no strings attached.”

— Celeste Ng

114. “Lydia felt her heart in her chest like a pellet of ice, sliding down out of reach.”

— Celeste Ng

115. “You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she’d been and the child she’d become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin. It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again.”

— Celeste Ng

116. “Lexie was used to people wanting her opinion, to the point where she often assumed they did and just hadn’t quite said so.”

— Celeste Ng

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

— Celeste Ng

118. “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.”

— Celeste Ng

119. “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.”

— Celeste Ng

120. “Pearl was smarter than any of them and yet she seemed comfortable with everything she didn’t know: she lingered comfortably in the gray spaces.”

— Celeste Ng

121. “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.”

— Celeste Ng

122. “All their lives Nath had understood, better than anyone, the lexicon of their family, the things they could never truly explain to outsiders: that a book or a dress meant more than something to read or something to wear; that attention came with expectations that – like snow – drifted and settled and crushed you with their weight.”

— Celeste Ng

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

— Celeste Ng

124. “Years might pass and they might change, both of them, but she was sure she would still know her own child, just as she would know herself, no matter how long it had been. She was certain of this. She would spend months, years, the rest of her life looking for her daughter, searching the face of every young woman she meet for as long as it took, searching for a spark of familiarity in the faces of strangers.”

— Celeste Ng

125. “To have such a deep taproot in a single place, to be immersed in it so thoroughly that it had steeped into every fiber of your being: she couldn’t imagine it.”

— Celeste Ng

126. “Unconsciously, one hand crept down to her belly, where an ache was beginning to blossom.”

— Celeste Ng

127. “You loved so hard and hoped so much and then you ended up with nothing.”

— Celeste Ng

128. “Sometimes, just when you think everything’s gone, you find a way.”

— Celeste Ng

129. “She did not even have words, only a feeling, a terrible hollow feeling, as if everything inside her had been scooped out raw.”

— Celeste Ng

130. “James slid into his seat and the girl next to him asked, “What’s wrong with your eyes?” It wasn’t until he heard the horror in the teacher’s voice – “Shirley Byron!” – that he realized he was supposed to be embarrassed; the next time it happened, he had learned his lesson and turned red right away.”

— Celeste Ng

131. “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.”

— Celeste Ng

132. “Please, Marilyn thinks. In this word is all she cannot phrase, even to herself. Please come back, please let me start over, please stay. Please.”

— Celeste Ng

133. “In kindegarten, he had learned how to make a bruise stop hurting: you pressed it over and over with your thumb. the first times it hurt so much your eyes watered. The second time it hurt a little less. The tenth time, it was barely an ache.”

— Celeste Ng

134. “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.”

— Celeste Ng

135. “When she spoke of Pauline Hawthorne, her tone was half the adoration of a schoolgirl for a crush, half the adoration of a devotee for a saint. It had not been clear, at first, that it would turn out that way.”

— Celeste Ng

136. “Most communities just happen; the best are planned.”

— Celeste Ng

137. “There was no room left in her for anger. Something within her tipped and cracked.”

— Celeste Ng

138. “But at that moment she had known, with a certainty she would never feel about anything else in her life, that it was right, that she wanted this man in her life. Something inside her said, He understands. What it’s like to be different.”

— Celeste Ng

139. “It struck her then, as if someone had said it aloud: her mother was dead, and the only thing worth remembering about her, in the end, was that she had cooked. Marilyn.”

— Celeste Ng

140. “All up and down the street the houses looked like any others – but inside them were people who might be happy, or taking refuge, or steeling themselves to go out into the world, searching for something better. So many lives she would never know about, unfolding behind those doors.”

— Celeste Ng

141. “His job was to make losses feel smaller. But the students never turned their C-minuses into Bs; new funding never materialized. You never got what you wanted; you just learned to get by without it.”

— Celeste Ng

142. “Being allowed to do something and knowing how to do it are not the same thing.”

— Celeste Ng

143. “Literally was one of Lexie’s favorite words, which she deployed even when the situation was anything but literal. In this case, for once, it was more or less true.”

— Celeste Ng

144. “There was a whole stack of casseroles in the fridge, a leaning tower of Pyrex baking dishes crimped in foil. As if no one knew what to do in the face of such tragedy except to make the heaviest, heartiest, most prosaic dish they could, to give the bereaved something solid to hold on to.”

— Celeste Ng

145. “Part of the process,” Pearl informed him as they cut through the living room, with the nonchalant air of a native unfazed by the curious customs of the land.”

— Celeste Ng

146. “Did you not understand me? You need me to speak in Ebonics?”

— Celeste Ng

147. “The problem with rules, he reflected, was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the times there were simply “ways”, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure which side of the line you stood on. He had always admired his wife’s idealism, her belief that the world could be made better, could be made orderly, could perhaps even be made perfect. For the first time, he wondered if the same held true for him.”

— Celeste Ng

148. “Everything, she had come to understand, was something like infinity.”

— Celeste Ng

149. “Everything Mrs. Richardson had put out of her mind from the hospital stay – everything she thought she’d forgotten – her body remembered on a cellular level: the rush of anxiety, the fear that permeated her thoughts of Izzy. The microscopic focus on each thing Izzy did, turning it this way and that, scrutinizing it for signs of weakness or disaster.”

— Celeste Ng

150. “It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again.”

— Celeste Ng