Top 200 Celeste Ng Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “There was an ease between them that, Moody was sure, could only come from being intimately comfortable with another person’s body.”

— Celeste Ng

202. “Somewhere out there, you knew, wealthy people were barricaded in their fortresses, fed and warm, if not happy, but soon you stopped thinking of them. You stopped thinking about other people at all.”

— Celeste Ng

203. “He wonders who decided which books were too dangerous to keep, and who it was that had to hunt down and collect the condemned books, like an executioner, ferrying them to their doom. He wonders if it is his father.”

— Celeste Ng

204. “We don’t burn our books, she says. We pulp them. Much more civilized, right? Mash them up, recycle them into toilet paper. Those books wiped someone’s rear end a long time ago.”

— Celeste Ng

205. “The librarian sighs. How can you know, she says, if no one teaches you, and no one ever talks about it, and all the books about it are gone?”

— Celeste Ng

206. “She was always doing that, telling him stories. Prying open cracks for magic to seep in, making the world a place of possibility.”

— Celeste Ng

207. “Today it strikes Bird as unbearably sad, to pass by and leave no trace of your existence. To.”

— Celeste Ng

208. “For the first time in his life, he is unremarkable, and this feels like power.”

— Celeste Ng

209. “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

210. “All those years, as the only other person who understood their parents, he had absorbed her miseries offering silent sympathy or a squeeze on the shoulder or a wry smile.”

— Celeste Ng

211. “For Mia, however, the photographs were only a vague approximation of what she wanted to express, and she soon found herself not only altering the prints – with everything from ballpoint pen to splashes of laundry detergent – but experimenting with the camera itself, bending its limited range to her desires.”

— Celeste Ng

212. “We don’t burn our books, she says. We pulp them. Much more civilized, right? Mash them up, recycle them into toilet paper. Those books wiped someone’s rear end a long time ago. Oh, says Bird. So that’s what happened to his mother’s books. All those words.”

— Celeste Ng

213. “Succulents would grow anew from a broken-off leaf, pushing roots out into the air, then down into the soil: a piece of its own body, transformed into its child.”

— Celeste Ng

214. “And some people chide her for coming too late. One older woman – a Choctaw woman, whose granddaughter had been taken – looked at Margaret for a long time with weary eyes, then clicked her teeth. You think this is something new? She shook her head.”

— Celeste Ng

215. “She was always doing that, telling him stories. Prying open cracks for magic to seep in, making the world a place of possibility. After she left, he had stopped believing all those fantasies. Wispy, false dreams that disintegrated in the morning’s light. Now it occurs to him that, perhaps, there might be truth in them after all.”

— Celeste Ng

216. “Here the stars dazzled her eyes like sequins. This is what infinity looks like, she thought. Their clarity overwhelmed her, like pinpricks at her heart.”

— Celeste Ng

217. “Each test score had been lower than the last, reading like a strange weather forecast: ninety in September, mid-eighties in October, low seventies in November, sixties before Christmas.”

— Celeste Ng

218. “Only when he’s left Chinatown, and the faces around him become Black and white instead of Asian, do the flags become more sporadic, the people here apparently more confident that their loyalty will be assumed.”

— Celeste Ng

219. “His parents never go out or entertain; they have no dinner parties, no bridge group, no hunting buddies or luncheon pals. Like Lydia, no real friends.”

— Celeste Ng

220. “Staying unnoticed was how you survived.”

— Celeste Ng

221. “They set up her nursery in the bedroom in the attic, where things that were not wanted were kept.”

— Celeste Ng

222. “So you banned all those books, Sadie said, and the teacher had blinked twice at her over her glasses. Oh no, sweetie, she said. People think that sometimes, but no. No one bans anything. Haven’t you ever heard of the Bill of Rights? The class giggled, and Sadie flushed. Every school makes its own independent judgments, the teacher said.”

— Celeste Ng

223. “Each room had been painted a different color – the kitchen a sunny yellow, the living room a deep cantaloupe, the bedrooms a warm peach – and the overall effect was of stepping into a box of sunlight, even on a cloudy day.”

— Celeste Ng

224. “She had never seen an adult cry like that, with such an animal sound. Recklessly. As if there were nothing more to be lost. For years afterward, she would sometimes wake in the night, heart thumping, thinking she’d heard that agonized cry again.”

— Celeste Ng

225. “She’s going to get through this. Because she has to.”

— Celeste Ng

226. “For her the magic was not what words had been, but what they were capable of: their ability to sketch, with one sweeping brushstroke, the contours of an experience, the form of a feeling. How they could make the effable effable, how they could never be fully unraveled, it held infinite mysteries and wonders and sometimes all you could do was stand agape, rubbing your eyes, trying to see properly.”

— Celeste Ng

227. “And we need their generosity to keep this place open. Or, just as likely, someone got nervous and got rid of it preemptively. Us public libraries – a lot of us just can’t take the risk.”

— Celeste Ng

228. “Who ever thinks, recalling the face of the one they loved who is gone: yes, I looked at you enough, I loved you enough, we had enough time, any of this was enough?”

— Celeste Ng

229. “It was like a landscape they could not see all at once; it was like the sky at night, which turned and turned so they couldn’t find its edges. It would always feel too big.”

— Celeste Ng

230. “Up there- eighty-five miles high, ninety, ninety-five, the counter said- everything on earth would be invisible. Mothers who disappeared, fathers who didn’t love you, kids who mocked you – everything would shrink to pinpoints and vanish. Up there : nothing but stars.”

— Celeste Ng

231. “His father’s oldest habit: taking words apart like old clocks to show the gears still ticking inside.”

— Celeste Ng