Pung Quotes & Sayings

Sometimes you have to have the lightest touch to lift a heavy heart, to speak at all. — Kyo Maclear

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

But every day we meet someone whose behavior suddenly changes from one moment to the next. And we wonder: what happened to this person I thought I knew? Why is he acting so aggressively? Is it stress at work?
And then the next day the person is normal again. You're relieved, but soon after the rug is pulled out from under you when you least expect it. And this time, instead of asking what's wrong with this person, you wonder what you did wrong. — Paulo Coelho

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

I am so tired. Even the word sleep is a lure, a seduction. — Audrey Niffenegger

Ublala Pung grunted a laugh. 'They'd never find her if it was a manhunt. — Steven Erikson

I don't think it's government's job to find health care for people. I think it's the individual's job to find health care. — Ted Cruz

I heard her surprise and then the sigh as we began the rhythm of connection and self-absorption, the miracle of sex. — Delia Ephron

Few things are more negative than thinking positive for no reason. — Dov Davidoff

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

The difference of a single day is perceptible. Vegetables can only be tasted in perfection, gathered the same day. — John Pintard

People think I'm a freemason, and I'm not. People think I believe the end of the world is coming on 21 December 2012, and I don't. — Graham Hancock

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

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

Spirituality promotes passivity when the domain of spirit is defined as outside the world. When this world is the terrain of spirit, we ourselves become actors in the story, and this world becomes the realm in which the sacred must be honored and freedom created. — Starhawk

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

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

Hey, can you teach me the word for friend that you wrote on my card?"
"Peng you," I say.
"Peng you," she says, only instead of pung yo, it sounds like penguin. "Shee shee for being my penguin," she says. — Andrea Cheng

Better be a foole then a knave.
[Better be a fool than a knave.] — George Herbert

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

When you need help, you call on the Lord. — Lailah Gifty Akita

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

It was a Saturday, soft and silent, when the Wind spoke for the first time. — James Hugh Comey