Alice Pung Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life is nothing but high school. - Kurt Vonnegut — Alice Pung

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

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

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