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The Leavers QUOTES

The Leavers QUOTES

1 " Never had there been a time when sound, color, and feeling hadn’t been intertwined, when a dirty, rolling bass line hadn’t induced violets that suffused him with thick contentment, when the shades of certain chords sliding up to one another hadn’t produced dusty pastels that made him feel like he was cupping a tiny, golden bird. It wasn’t just music but also rumbling trains and rainstorms, occasional voices, a collective din. Colors and textures appeared in front of him, bouncing in time to the rhythm, or he’d get a flash of color in his mind, an automatic sensation of a tone, innate as breathing. "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers

2 " No matter how tired I was, I always felt more awake when I walked. "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers

3 " My new life was unstable and unsure, but each new day was shot through with new possibility. "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers

4 " I want you to know that you were wanted. I decided: I wanted you.

Yi Ba thought that only men could do what they wanted, but he was wrong. I stood with my toes in the ocean, euphoric at how far I had come, and two months later, when I gave birth to you, I would feel accomplished, tougher than any man. "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers

5 " I was often fatigued by the city, its bad breath belching through vents in the pavement, a guy testing his cell phone ringtones on a packed subway. "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers

6 " Everyone had stories they told themselves to get through the days. "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers

7 " It was that kind of mindfuck: to be too visible and invisible at the same time, in the ways it mattered the most. "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers

8 " It was a funny thing, forgiveness. You could spend years being angry with someone and then realize you no longer felt the same, that your usual mode of thinking had slipped away when you weren't noticing. "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers

9 " Maybe it wasn't about the moving to new places, but about the challenge of staying put. "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers

10 " Then the shoreline would grown dimmer and the blue would shoot in all directions, filling the frame around me, the sky so big it could swallow me, and I cracked open with happiness "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers

11 " She wasn’t listening to him. He recalled how she and Peter had insisted on English, his new name, the right education. How better and more hinged on their ideas of success, their plans. Mama, Chinese, the Bronx, Deming: they had never been enough. He shivered, and for a brief, horrible moment, he could see himself the way he realized they saw him—as someone who needed to be saved. "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers

12 " If he could just talk to his mother in person, maybe he could figure out who he should be. "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers

13 " No one had told me I could have such love for another person. When I thought of anything harmful happening to you the love burned a little, like a rash, but when I held you and you were calm, the love was beaming, like sunlight through the leaves of a tree. "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers

14 " So I'd grown up eating my words, and it wasn't until later that that I realized how many had gotten backed up inside me. In the factory dorm, sentences spilled out of me like a broken faucet, and when I moved even further away and saw children splashing into rivers spurting from fire hydrants, water pouring into the streets like it was endless, I would see my younger self in that hydrant, but tugged open, a hungry stream. "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers

15 " The book says in two months we can be speaking at a third grade level.'
'Third grade? That's for kids. Baby level.'
'If you don't try you'll be speaking at fetus level. Silent. "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers

16 " My father used to say women yapped too much, that some women would be better off not talking at all. So I’d grown up eating my words, and it wasn’t until later that I realized how many had gotten backed up inside me. "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers

17 " In the city, he had been just another kid. He had never known how exhausting it was to be conspicuous. "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers

18 " All this time, he'd been waiting for his real life to begin: Once he was accepted by Roland's friends and the band made it big. Once he found his mother. Then, things would change. But his life had been happening all along, in the jolt of the orange juice on his tongue or how he dreamt in two languages, how his students' faces looked when they figured out the meaning of a new word, the wisp of smoke as he blew out his birthday candles. The surge and turn and crunch of a perfect melody. "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers

19 " He loved cursing in Chinese, the breadth of options not available in English. He had trouble remembering the words for map and computer, but curses, those he knew by heart. "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers

20 " The boat rocked in the waves, and as I saw the lights of Kowloon come through the fog, I held the railing, breathless. How wrong I had been to assume this feeling had been lost forever. This lightheaded uncertainty, all my fear and joy - I could return here, punching the sky. Because I had found her: Polly Guo. Wherever I went next, I would never let her go again... The water was Minjiang, New York, Fuzhou, but most of all, it was you. "

― Lisa Ko , The Leavers