"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..."
- Celeste Ng
"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 o..."
"When a long, long time later, he stares down at the silent blue marble of the earth and thinks of his sister, as he will at every important moment of his life. He doesn't know this yet, but he senses ..."
"Hannah, as if she understood her place in the cosmos, grew from quiet infant to watchful child: a child fond of nooks and corners, who curled up in closets, behind sofas, under dangling tablecloths, s..."
"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 understa..."
"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."
"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 an..."
"Ed Lim’s daughter, Monique, was a junior now, but as she’d grown up, he and his wife had noted with dismay that there were no dolls that looked like her. At ten, Monique had begun poring over a mail-o..."
"It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?"
"At last something important had occurred, something that she ought to write down. But she did not know how to explain what had happened, how everything had changed in just one day, how someone she lov..."