Rona Wang
Goodreads Author
Born
in The United States
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August 2017
URL
https://www.goodreads.com/ronayw
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You Had Me at Hello World
5 editions
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expected publication
2025
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Cranesong
2 editions
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published
2019
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Some Safer Place
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Transition: Chapter One Young Writers Conference Writing Competition Collection, First Edition
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* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.
“Before the cremation, Mama and a few of the other older women sewed together a long tunic out of white-spun ramie. We thought it was the prettiest dress, made only more exquisite with Mama’s pink silk embroidery of lotus flowers strewn across the collar. We longed to try it on, to shed our blistered bodies and become women who belonged in such beautiful garments, those women who weaved shards of dawn in their hair and danced with August lightning oiling their calves.”
― Cranesong
― Cranesong
“This was unexpected, because Baba never did much of anything. The civil war was over and he’d fought on the right side, had slaughtered Kuomintang forces, razed cities to bone and salt. But when Baba came back, he carried the war with him. He knew things about death we could not begin to comprehend.”
― Cranesong
― Cranesong
“You began receiving the texts in late September, after the first date. You wore the
translucent dress with the high collar and open-shoulder sleeves that made you feel like you were a fashion writer for a New York magazine, or a high-powered exec of a Fortune 500 company: a shimmering butterfly, someone who mattered, not a
barely-eighteen college freshman who spent most evenings in her dorm room slurping Top Ramen.
The first guy was forty-five. His wife was the
same old song on the radio. He took you out for lobster and fried oysters. Afterwards, he grabbed your neck like you owed him something, and you closed your eyes and imagined pretty things: white-gold
ribbons of sunlight skimming the belly of oceans, the sequins falling from your prom dress the first time you slept with a guy, movies where everyone sings soprano and defies the laws of flight.”
― Cranesong
translucent dress with the high collar and open-shoulder sleeves that made you feel like you were a fashion writer for a New York magazine, or a high-powered exec of a Fortune 500 company: a shimmering butterfly, someone who mattered, not a
barely-eighteen college freshman who spent most evenings in her dorm room slurping Top Ramen.
The first guy was forty-five. His wife was the
same old song on the radio. He took you out for lobster and fried oysters. Afterwards, he grabbed your neck like you owed him something, and you closed your eyes and imagined pretty things: white-gold
ribbons of sunlight skimming the belly of oceans, the sequins falling from your prom dress the first time you slept with a guy, movies where everyone sings soprano and defies the laws of flight.”
― Cranesong
“What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.”
― Outline
― Outline
“I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.”
― Outline
― Outline
“Words were different when they lived inside of you.”
― Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
― Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
“I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get.”
― Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
― Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
“I wanted to tell them that I'd never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren't meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them so many things and yet I didn't have the words. So I just stupidly repeated myself. "Dante's my friend.”
― Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
― Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

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Rona
Oct 23, 2017 09:56PM

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