The most useful quotations are long enough to reveal how the writing works. These 20 selections from Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow are organised into connected themes, with the narrative moment, named techniques and an argument about human experience. Build connections between entries rather than trying to fit every quotation into one essay.
For the wider argument, read our Cold Enough for Snow analysis and study guide.
Connection, care and unequal understanding
1. “And perhaps I felt that this would put us on equal footing in some way, to both be made strangers.”
Context: Planning the trip to Japan
Techniques: Hedging; spatial metaphor; paradox.
The spatial metaphor makes equality sound like a position the daughter can arrange through travel. Yet the hedging presents a hope, not an achievement: wanting intimacy does not remove unequal knowledge or control. Use this tension to argue that shared experiences do not necessarily produce shared meanings.
2. “doing so was like applying a kind of firm but gentle pressure.”
Context: The gallery café: asking to visit another exhibition
Techniques: Simile; juxtaposed adjectives; self-exposure.
The simile brings opposing qualities into one act of persuasion. The daughter recognises pressure inside her kindness, but recognition does not immediately change her conduct. Au therefore complicates the assumption that self-awareness guarantees ethical action: affection can still become a demand that someone else fulfil our expectations.
3. “to look on her in flawed understanding, and console in all the insufficient ways.”
Context: The sister reflects on caring for her daughter
Techniques: Qualifying adjectives; parallel infinitives; understated tone.
The qualifying adjectives limit both understanding and consolation without making either worthless. Moving from observation to action, the phrasing makes imperfect care preferable to withholding help until complete knowledge is possible. This supports an argument that compassion is a practice of responsiveness rather than emotional mastery.
4. “I knew that she wanted me to be with her on this, to follow her”
Context: The mother explains her beliefs in the church
Techniques: First-person interpretation; spatial metaphor; role reversal.
The spatial metaphor reverses who leads: the mother now invites the daughter to follow her beliefs. The daughter cannot simply enter that perspective, exposing her own limits as a listener. Because the statement remains her interpretation, the scene reveals mutual incomprehension without giving readers complete access to the mother’s mind.
5. “I had thought my mother would be tired, but she went up the steps without ever changing her pace”
Context: The last visit to the Inari gates
Techniques: Adversative turn; physical action; reversal.
The adversative turn places an assumption beside observable movement. The mother’s sustained pace challenges the daughter’s fixed division between a capable carer and a dependent parent. Au presents vulnerability as changeable and relational, inviting readers to revise familiar identities instead of treating age as a complete explanation.
Language, migration and inherited identity
6. “It was strange at once to be so familiar and yet so separated. I wondered how I could feel so at home in a place that was not mine.”
Context: A Tokyo restaurant recalls the mother’s childhood
Techniques: Paradox; rhetorical reflection; juxtaposition.
The paradox lets belonging and separation coexist within one perception. The Tokyo restaurant evokes inherited impressions rather than a literal return to the mother’s homeland. Au suggests that cultural familiarity can arise through association while still leaving a person conscious of the distance between imagined inheritance and lived experience.
7. “the bank teller unable to understand her near-perfect, colonial English?”
Context: The narrator imagines her mother’s early migrant experiences
Techniques: Interrogative speculation; juxtaposition; linguistic irony.
The contrast between linguistic competence and failed recognition exposes a possible barrier within migration. Crucially, the question is the daughter’s speculation, not a confirmed transcript of her mother’s past. Use the interrogative form to distinguish an empathetic attempt to imagine experience from a claim to know it completely.
8. “try and talk to her in Cantonese, which she neither spoke nor understood.”
Context: The sister’s childhood visit to Hong Kong
Techniques: Negative parallelism; contrast between intention and access.
The negative parallelism closes off both speaking and understanding despite the relatives’ attempt at contact. Affection and kinship cannot automatically overcome unequal access to language. Au represents cultural belonging as something experienced through participation, not something guaranteed simply by ancestry or family intention.
9. “When we were younger, my mother had regularly read to us from a book of Japanese fables, having saved nothing from her own childhood.”
Context: The narrator remembers stories while walking alone
Techniques: Juxtaposition; embedded narrative; displaced inheritance.
The juxtaposition places cultural transmission beside personal loss. Borrowed fables become a genuine part of the daughter’s family memory even though they do not preserve an intact record of the mother’s childhood. Au challenges a rigid model of inheritance by showing that continuity can involve adaptation, absence and imaginative substitution.
10. “I thought too of how my mother’s first language was Cantonese, and how mine was English, and how we only ever spoke together in one, and not the other.”
Context: The train journey to Kyoto
Techniques: Parallel syntax; contrast; cumulative reflection.
The cumulative parallel clauses initially balance two languages, then disclose their unequal place in the relationship. English enables conversation while leaving part of the mother’s linguistic life outside it. The passage therefore complicates simple claims that communication either succeeds or fails: intimacy and cultural distance can remain simultaneous.
Education, class and the performance of taste
11. “The girl knew so much without seeming to try, and she seemed complete, defined in some way that I wasn’t.”
Context: The narrator compares herself with a university classmate
Techniques: Contrast; qualifying diction; metaphor of completeness.
The metaphor of completeness makes the classmate appear to possess a finished identity. Repeated qualifications nevertheless expose that impression as the narrator’s judgement, not an objective fact. Intellectual aspiration becomes entangled with social comparison, showing how the desire to belong can turn another person’s apparent ease into evidence of personal inadequacy.
12. “It was as if this knowledge was truly an elixir, a drug.”
Context: The narrator’s intensive reading at university
Techniques: Metaphor; paired connotations; ambivalent intensity.
The figurative comparison joins renewal with possible dependence. Learning is genuinely exhilarating, but its medicinal associations suggest the narrator also wants it to cure insecurity. Au does not dismiss education; she questions whether acquiring cultural knowledge can resolve the emotional need to feel complete or socially legitimate.
13. “Conversation was like a kind of judo, an exercise in constant movement.”
Context: The lecturer’s party
Techniques: Simile; kinetic imagery; competitive undertone.
The simile and kinetic imagery turn discussion into a contest requiring agility. Intellectual sociability can be pleasurable while demanding constant adjustment to other people’s responses. This is useful evidence for an argument that belonging is sometimes performed through cultural fluency, rather than simply experienced as effortless mutual recognition.
14. “They were exactly the same as the ones in the lecturer’s house, and yet also entirely different.”
Context: The blue-and-white bowls after the narrator returns home
Techniques: Paradox; material motif; contextual juxtaposition.
The paradox separates material resemblance from perceived value. The bowls do not need to change physically for the narrator to see them differently in two social settings. Au makes class and acquired taste visible through an ordinary object, exposing how external standards can transform familiarity into embarrassment.
15. “this kind of response too was false, a performance, and not the one I had been looking for.”
Context: The narrator speaks to her mother about responding to art
Techniques: Theatrical metaphor; retrospective reassessment; qualification.
The theatrical metaphor revises the narrator’s earlier admiration of fluent artistic response. The qualification does not reject informed interpretation altogether; it questions expression that becomes compulsory display. Personal growth here involves reconsidering what knowledge is for, rather than merely becoming better at meeting the expectations of a prestigious group.
Memory, interpretation and ordinary care
16. “Throughout my childhood, my mother had told me a version of this story many times”
Context: The narrator recalls hearing the uncle’s romance
Techniques: Iterative narration; qualification; embedded storytelling.
Iterative narration makes the family story familiar, while the qualifying noun admits that repetition can involve variation. Au prepares readers to separate emotional conviction from factual certainty. Family identity depends on shared telling, but the authority of a remembered narrative must remain open to another person’s account.
17. “nothing like that had ever happened to her brother.”
Context: The mother denies the remembered romance
Techniques: Absolute negation; structural reversal; conflicting testimony.
The absolute negation interrupts the romance the narrator has made convincing. This structural reversal requires readers to reconsider their own investment in a vivid story rather than simply blaming one character for faulty memory. Au withholds a definitive replacement, presenting uncertainty as part of the experience of inherited family history.
18. “to make things not as they were, but as we wished they had been, or rather as we saw it.”
Context: The pentimento discussion near the end
Techniques: Metafiction; self-correction; contrast between fact and perspective.
The self-correction changes the claim from wishful invention to the shaping effects of perspective. Within the pentimento discussion, earlier and revised accounts remain layered rather than cleanly erased. Au presents storytelling as an active reconstruction of experience, meaningful without being a neutral copy of what happened.
19. “by looking indirectly at the thing they wanted to focus on, they were sometimes able to see it even more clearly than with their own eyes.”
Context: The camera obscura analogy during the discussion of myth
Techniques: Analogy; paradox; metatextual reflection.
The camera obscura analogy makes indirect observation paradoxically clarifying. It also reflects the novel’s associative method: artworks and remembered objects disclose relationships without an exhaustive explanation. The qualification prevents art from becoming a guaranteed route to truth, preserving the difference between sharpened attention and complete understanding.
20. “I knelt and, with one swift tug, helped her pull it on.”
Context: The final action: helping the mother with her shoe
Techniques: Concrete verbs; bodily gesture; understated closure.
Concrete verbs bring the ending down to a small bodily action. The daughter stops merely observing her mother and responds to a practical need, without resolving every uncertain memory or emotional difference. Understated closure gives care its significance through participation rather than an announcement of perfect reconciliation.
Using these quotations in an essay
Begin with an argument that answers the question, then choose evidence that tests or develops it. Name a relevant technique, explain how the particular wording works and connect its effect to the experience being represented. A later moment that complicates an earlier claim often produces a stronger paragraph than several quotations making the same point.
These selections are adapted from NST’s supplied teaching guide and retain its quotation wording. Some are passages rather than complete sentences. Check punctuation, surrounding context and page references against your school edition. A quotation bank supports practice towards high-level analysis; it does not guarantee a Band 6.
