Our Missing Hearts Quotes

“Why did I tell you so many stories? Because I wanted the world to make sense to you. I wanted to make sense of the world, for you. I wanted the world to make sense.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“When does she stop speaking? When are you ever done with the story of someone you love? You turn the most precious of your memories over and over, wearing their edges smooth, warming them again with your heat. You touch the curves and hollows of every detail you have, memorizing them, reciting them once more though you already know them in your bones. 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, Our Missing Hearts

“it seemed the sanest and most logical course: if the world was on fire, you might as well burn bright.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“If we fear something, it is all the more imperative we study it thoroughly.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“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, Our Missing Hearts

“Librarians, of all people, understood the value of knowing, even if that information could not yet be used.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“there’s one thing he remembers from stories, it’s that people who offer help along your way—whether directing you to treasure or warning you of danger—should not be ignored.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“Maybe, she thinks, this is simply what living is: an infinite list of transgressions that did not weigh against the joys but that simply overlaid them, the two lists mingling and merging, all the small moments that made up the mosaic of a person, a relationship, a life.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“It happened so slowly that you might not even notice it at all, like the sky turning from dusk to dark.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“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, Our Missing Hearts

“No sign of her anywhere here. Signs of her everywhere here.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“Too unpatriotic, right, to tell you the horrible things our country’s done before. The camps at Manzanar, or what happens at the border. They probably teach you that most plantation owners were kind to their slaves and that Columbus discovered America, don’t they?”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“Somewhere out there are people who still know her poems, who've hidden scraps of them away in the folds of their minds before setting match to the papers of their hands. He will find them. He will ask them what they remember. He will piece together their recollections, fragmentary and incomplete though they may be, mapping the holes of one against the solid patches of another. And in this way, piece by piece, he will set her back down on paper again.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“breathing in the peculiar smell of the library: a mix of dust and leather and melted vanilla ice cream. Warm, like the scent of someone’s skin.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“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, Our Missing Hearts

“There is a long history, in the U.S. and elsewhere, of removing children as a means of political control.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“When are you ever done with the story of someone you love? You turn the most precious of your memories over and over, wearing their edges smooth, warming them again with your heat. You touch the curves and hollows of every detail you have, memorizing them, reciting them once more though you already know them in your bones. 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, Our Missing Hearts

“Turning your energy toward what’s to come, leaning into the light.

When you were born, your father wanted you to have my name. Miu: a seedling. He liked that idea, you as our little sprout. But I chose his: Gardner. One who makes things grow. I wanted you to be not only the grown, but the grower. To have power over your own life, turning your energy toward what’s to come, leaning into the light.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“For the first time in his life, he is unremarkable, and this feels like power.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“Today it strikes Bird as unbearably sad, to pass by and leave no trace of your existence. To”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“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, Our Missing Hearts

“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, Our Missing Hearts

“bring back our missing hearts.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“I’m not saying there aren’t bad mothers, she says. Just that you don’t always know. What makes them do something, or not do something. Most of us, we’re trying our best.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“And how much of a difference can it make really, just one story, even all these stories taken together and funneled into the ear of the busy world—a world moving so quickly that voices and sounds Doppler into a rising whine, so distracted that even when your attention snags on the burr of something unusual, you are dragged away before you can see it, uprooting it like a bee’s spent stinger. It is hard for anything to be heard and even if anyone hears it, how much of a difference could it really make, what change could it possibly bring, just these words, just this thing that happened once to one person that the listener does not and will never know. It is just a story. It is only words. She does not know”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“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, Our Missing Hearts

“Did the pomegranate know, she thought, did it ever wonder where they went, how they turned out. If they’d ever manage to grow. All those bits of its missing heart. Scattered, to sprout elsewhere.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“There is a long history, in the U.S. and elsewhere, of removing children as a means of political control. If this strikes a nerve with you—as I hope it does—please learn more about the many instances, both past and ongoing, in which children have been taken from their families: the separations of enslaved families, government boarding schools for Indigenous children (such as that in Carlisle, PA), the inequities built into the foster care system, the separations of migrant families still occurring at the U.S.’s southern border, and beyond. Much more attention needs to be brought to this subject, but Laura Briggs’s Taking Children: A History”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“The average American, one judge ruled, cannot reasonably be expected to visually distinguish between various varieties of persons of Asian origin. As if they were types of apples, or breeds of dogs; as if those persons of Asian origin did not count as average Americans themselves.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

“How porous the boundary was between him and the world, as if everything flowed through him like water through a net. She’d worried about him, moving through a rough world as a tender bare heart, beating out in the open where anything could cause a bruise.”
― Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts