Celeste Ng Quotes

I have an interest in the outsider…In fiction you’re not often writing about the typical, you are interested in outliers, the points of interest. Part of it comes from feeling I was the only Asian or person of colour … another part comes from my personality: I’m an introvert, and my usual survival mode in a large group is to stand by a wall and watch everybody.

Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast. (first lines)

the problem with rules...was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time they were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure what side of the line you stood on. (chapter 16, p269)

As a former debater, I think that the “debate” mentality is a huge part of the problems in our public discourse. Debate—which many aspiring lawyers do in school—teaches you to treat everything like an academic thought experiment, rather than real issues that affect actual humans.

Dreaming of his future, he no longer heard all the things she did not say. (p164)

Fiction says, I believe that this could happen. It is prospective, focused on possibilities. It opens us to the possible, the hypothetical, rather than binding us to the actual. And this, more than anything, is why true stories alone aren’t enough, why we should recognize fiction and read it, why fiction is valuable. Without fiction, we might end up like the woman on the bus, unable to muster interest in anything that isn’t a True Story, that doesn’t come with shocking photographs. We would have no what ifs, only what dids. We would have nothing but the actual. And if we believe only in the actual, how small our lives would be, how limited and mean our humanity, to demand proof before we believe or conceive of suffering, loss, or strangeness.

It’s tricky to write about your hometown the same way it’s tricky to write about your family: sometimes you are so close that you can’t see them properly. And it’s hard to be emotionally honest, as well. I loved—and love—Shaker Heights, so I want to portray it lovingly. At the same time, it has its faults like any community, and I wanted to try and be clear-eyed about that. (2017)

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. (p271)

Here is a prayer: As you gain power, may you never forget what it’s like to not have power.

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. (p271)

one way to think of privilege is who’s allowed to make mistakes.

I don't know that art by itself is enough to sort of magically change people's minds, but what I hope is that if it can get people questioning and thinking and connecting with other people, that might be something that will get them to take action. I think art can touch us emotionally sometimes. It kind of blindsides us, but in a good way. And when you sit with those feelings, that might be one of the things that pushes you in the right direction. (2022)

I think even if I did try to write something that had nothing to do with women or race, which are two pretty broad topics, I don’t know how I would do that. I don’t think there’s a way that I could write a buddy cop drama, or something really far from anything I’ve written, that didn’t have pieces of race and gender. Those are parts of the world we live in, and they are things I think about. It all comes into the voice of your writing, and you can’t write about someone else’s voice. You can only write in your own.

I started tweeting more about social issues that were close to me—Asian American representation, LGBTQ rights, and compassion—as I started to get more well-known. It just seemed to me that if people were listening, I owed it to others to try and speak about something that mattered, and call attention to things that were getting overlooked. You could say I became much more political with the advent of the 2016 election, when the stakes became much higher for me as a woman, a woman of color, and a child of immigrants. But really I’ve always been political, because when you’re in any marginalized group, your existence is politicized for you, whether you like it or not. (2017)

She wondered if they'd ever get back to normal, if things would ever be the same between them. Sex changed things, she realized-not just between you and the other person, but between you and everyone. (chapter 19 p304)