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Quote by Celeste Ng

“To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a *place*, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once. 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.”

Quote by Celeste Ng

Work

Little Fires Everywhere

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Author

Celeste Ng
Celeste Ng

Celeste Ng is a contemporary American writer known for her insightful social commentary and delicate emotional portrayal. Her works often focus on family, identity, and racial issues, and have gained widespread popularity among readers. more

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“There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being.”

“Grief needs an outlet. Creativity offers one. Some psychiatrists see mourning and creativity as the perfect marriage, the thought processes of one neatly complementing the other. A child’s contradictory impulses to both acknowledge and deny a parent’s death represents precisely the type of rich ambiguity that inspires artistic expression.”

“وبعدئذ حينما كنتم ايها الاطفال صغارا، كنت انا مركز عوالمكم! كنت كل شىء بالنسبة لكم! كنت تجدنى فى كل اموركم وتفاصيلكم الصغيرة، و "اين امى؟ الى اين ذهبت؟" وفى اللحظة التى تعودون فيها من المدرسة، "امى؟ هل عدت الى البيت؟" ليس هذا عدلا ، يا كودى. ليس هذا عدلا فى الواقع، الان انا عجوز وامشى دون ان يلاحظنى احد. يبدو لى لى هذا ظلما يا كودى. لكن لا تخبر الاخرين اننى قلت هذا". صفحة 216”