The Leavers Quotes

“Everyone had stories they told themselves to get through the days.”
― Lisa Ko, The Leavers

“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

“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

“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

“Maybe it wasn't about the moving to new places, but about the challenge of staying put.”
― Lisa Ko, The Leavers

“No matter how tired I was, I always felt more awake when I walked.”
― Lisa Ko, The Leavers

“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

“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

“If he could just talk to his mother in person, maybe he could figure out who he should be.”
― Lisa Ko, The Leavers

“Deming's a child, he doesn't get to decide."

Leon snorted. "A mother is supposed to sacrifice for her son, not the other way around."

"You better take that back." This man I had slept next to for years, this man I was supposed to marry-- he'd never known me. "Take that back right now."

A mother was supposed to lay down and die for her children, and Leon got to be called Yi Ba because he watched TV with you several afternoons a week. If he bought you a cheap toy, Vivian would crow, "How thoughtful!" and when he took you to the park the neighbors complimented him for being such a good daddy. But no one called me a good mama when I did those things.”
― Lisa Ko, The Leavers

“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

“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

“In the city, he had been just another kid. He had never known how exhausting it was to be conspicuous.”
― Lisa Ko, The Leavers

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Maybe it wasn’t about moving to new places, but about the challenge of staying put.”
― Lisa Ko, The Leavers

“Music was a language of its own, and soon it would become his third language, a half-diminished seventh to a major seventh to a minor seventh as pinchy-sweet as flipping between Chinese tones. American English was loose major fifths; Fuzhounese angled sevenths and ninths.”
― Lisa Ko, The Leavers

“He had never known how exhausting it was to be conspicuous.”
― Lisa Ko, The Leavers

“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

“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

“The sky was so clear and blue, so striking in its stillness, that I wanted to cry.”
― Lisa Ko, The Leavers

“It was home, a home, but he knew he would have to leave here, too.”
― Lisa Ko, The Leavers

“He basked in her barbed teasing, recalled her toughest, more resilient love. How different it was from Kay's exposed emotions. His mother had never demanded his reassurance.”
― Lisa Ko, The Leavers

“Because if he knew, then it had been real, not a nightmare I could just write off as my imagination. Like how talking to you reminded me of the nightmare of losing you.”
― Lisa Ko, The Leavers

“In Ridgeborough, when Deming Guo was no longer a name that was said aloud, he used to picture the Other Deming and Other Mama, still living in Queens. It was a sort of comfort, bittersweet; at least they'd remained together.”
― Lisa Ko, The Leavers

“The word for watermelon had swum up and emerged, and he concentrated until the rest of the sentence returned. "Give me a watermelon. They're fresh right? Good watermelon, right?" He recalled enough to haggle, bumping the guy's price down twenty-five cents, and it felt like he'd been born again.

The man said, "Go lower than that and my family will starve, thanks to you," but there was laughter behind his scowl.”
― Lisa Ko, The Leavers

“I’m often bothered by this notion that literature shouldn’t be political. How can you separate art from the world it’s created in, and why would you want to?”
― Lisa Ko, The Leavers

“One week later, tucked into a double bed sheathed with red flannel, Deming Guo awoke with the crumbs of dialect on his tongue, smudges and smears of dissolving syllables, nouns and verbs washed out to sea. One language had outseeped another; New York City had provided him with an arsenal of new words. He’d bled English vowels and watched his mother’s face fall.”
― Lisa Ko, The Leavers