Alice Pung > Quotes

“I never tell them about our lives. You know why? It is not because I am ashamed. It is because some things are just good, too good to be judged.”
― Alice Pung, Laurinda

“Love was a verb with a certain amount of energy attached to it - a daily quota - and you had to choose on whom you wanted to spend this energy. That was love. That was why people had to pray for it. If it were not finite, no one would pine for love in their lives - they would just wait to receive or learn to give.”
― Alice Pung, Her Father's Daughter

“People, even well-intentioned people, were always trying to take away our quiet little successes and joys and replace them with big, overarching fears.”
― Alice Pung, Laurinda

“Love was like notches on a speaker that could be cranked up and down, the decibels of desire, the frequencies of feeling. Sometimes she thought that she might have cranked it all the way up and broken the dial before the music had even started.”
― Alice Pung, Her Father's Daughter

“And here was the bitter paradox of adolescense: alone, I was most myself, most true. But the self that really mattered was the self that was visible, the self that could be shown to other people.”
― Alice Pung, Laurinda

“She had always thought the word 'pheromones' made it sound as though molecules were floating in the air, shaped like little fluted horns, ready to attach themselves to the nearest target. Microscopic Edison phonographs flying about, their brassy mouths puckered to sucker onto bare unsuspecting skin. These were what he sent out to her. The pheromones. The eyeless babies of energy.”
― Alice Pung, Her Father's Daughter

“I wish I could have told you how much talking and writing to you meant to me all year. How you were my bullshit detector. How you listened and kept me true, even when I wanted to block my ears, because you had no filter between your thoughts and your mouth. How you were my best friend, and how it was only because of you that I never felt isolated or desperate to attach myself to anyone at Laurinda.”
― Alice Pung, Laurinda

“I'd never been much good at finding openings in conversations here. I treated them like stuffing envelopes- the moment a gap appeared, I was worried I'd insert the wrong thing and it would sealed and delivered. Or I'd insert something too large to fit through the post, and it would not be accepted”
― Alice Pung, Laurinda

“I'd seen how the top-performing girls at Laurinda were cultivated like hothouse strawberries - bright and lush. Out in the real world, they would bruise. I wanted to see how the Cabinet would cope in two years' time, when they would be in the same classes as my most driven and hard-working Christ Our Saviour friends, and the most tenacious and gifted public school students, the hardy banksias and olive trees and root vegetables that would last all through winter.”
― Alice Pung, Laurinda

“All teenagers are drama queens inside their minds, even the mousiest of us. We load and reload movies of ourselves in heroic postures and outlandish triumphs, movies that if they were ever to be played in front of an audience of people we know and love, would cause us to shrivel in shame”
― Alice Pung, Laurinda

“In their white-daisy bouquet of slim pickings, they cast out all the yellow chrysanthemums, and anything brown was considered wilted.”
― Alice Pung

“I was crying out of frustration, frustration that I could not be left alone, that no girl at this school could possibly be allowed some space to breathe and sort out her own thoughts.”
― Alice Pung, Laurinda

“I wasn't afraid of being alone, but I was afraid of what people would think about my solitary state. People, even well-intentioned people, were always trying to take away our quiet little successes and joys and replace them with big, overarching fears. At this school, the worst thing was trying to rise above the limits set for you by the minds of others. Each girl was an island of her own dreams and insecurities, thoughts that made us different in a deeper way than the differences of musical taste, clothes or even culture. Thoughts about the best way to be stoic, how to live with very little control in life, how to make the most of a miserable time doing something that you were supposed to love. And if people thought that fifteen-year-old girls never thought about these sorts of things, it was only because we didn't have the words to express them.
We talked all the time, but we hadn't yet learned the words to link thoughts and ideas with any depth of feeling, because we didn't really talk to adults. We talked only to each other. And within this little world, we imprisoned one another. You could be anyone you wanted, Linh– until you were judged and held captive by everyone else's thoughts. Nothing has a stronger hold over a girl than the fear of the thoughts of her peers– thoughts that change five times in a day. No wonder things are so complicated with teenagers.”
― Alice Pung

“Life is nothing but high school.” —Kurt Vonnegut”
― Alice Pung, Laurinda

“...If you have enough inner resources, you can be by yourself for a long time and not feel smaller because of it.”
― Alice Pung, Laurinda

“Never underestimate the power of a scented candle!" declared a sign beneath a display of coloured candles.
Yes, I thought. Buy two and invade Russia!”
― Alice Pung

“To be part of the Cabinet, I'd had to keep my true self apart. and there's only so much of yourself you can hide, Linh, before you start to fall apart.”
― Alice Pung, Laurinda

“They couldn't see that the bigger I got, the smaller I became, and they didn't understand that once the baby came, I would be gone.”
― Alice Pung, One Hundred Days

“You are not truly good until you are tested, and even then you might become a worse person.”
― Alice Pung, Laurinda

“I'm keeping this record to let you know that it wasn't always that way. That you were once mine, and when I looked in your dark eyes, you made me very happy.”
― Alice Pung, One Hundred Days

“I'd never read a book about someone like me. Characters like me didn't exist because my life wasn't interesting, not even to myself”
― Alice Pung, One Hundred Days

“As a general rule, teenage girls never, ever see solitude as a choice.”
― Alice Pung

“The Japanese say you have three faces: the first face, you show to the world; the second face, to your close family and friends; and the third face, you never show to anyone. The third face is the truest reflection of who you are.”
― Alice Pung, My First Lesson: Stories Inspired by Laurinda

“Each girl was an island of her own dreams and insecurities, thoughts that made us different in a deeper way than the differences of musical tastes, clothes or even culture. Thoughts about the best way to be stoic, how to live with very little control in life, how to make the most of a miserable time doing something you were supposed to love. And if people thought that fifteen year old girls never thought about these sorts of things, it was only because we didn't have the words to express them.”
― Alice Pung

“The first day she rocked up to school she was wearing a massive brown rosary, hanging around her neck outside her school uniform jumper with a swinging cross at the bottom. Her dad probably made her wear it. “Hey yo, pimping for Christ!” I called out, and she turned as red as the sacred heart, bless.”
― Alice Pung , Begin, End, Begin: A #LoveOzYA Anthology

“There's a secret to getting a boyfriend at fifteen, and it is this: you have to have a group of friends. You'll never get picked up alone unless by creeps or unless you are extremely beautiful (and even then you'll mostly get creeps), because alone you have no personality. It's only when you're with your friends that you start to shine.”
― Alice Pung, Laurinda

“There was something creepy about the femininity at Laurinda, something so cloistered and yet brimming with stifled sex that it reminded me of the Victorian whalebone corsets we once saw at the Werribee Park Mansion, which kept everything cramped tight, until the stitches unravelled and out poured mounds of naked pink and white. It was the femininity of tiny éclairs and teacups, crocheted collars and little pearl earrings, the young-girl-to-old-woman transition that skipped sexuality altogether, so that when you saw it - in Gina, for instance - it was as garish as a scarlet A on the chest.”
― Alice Pung, Laurinda

“After my breakdown, and the Lamb’s hospital visit, I did not yearn for excitement. I liked the quiet company of the Lamb and Professor Gombrich. I liked spending time with Mum at home, and doing things that made an immediate difference to our lives: cleaning dishes and doing laundry and cooking a huge pot of stock. There was nothing wrong with this, I thought.”
― Alice Pung, Lucy and Linh

“There is nothing more powerful than the feeling of belonging to a group.”
― Alice Pung, Laurinda