Alexander Chee Quotes & Sayings

Throughout my reading life, I've enjoyed many memorable meals-if only fictionally. The oysters at dinner near the beginning of Anna Karenina, the dinner Nana throws for her overflowing guests in Zola's Nana, the walk through Les Halles for breakfast in Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and nearly every meal in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt. — Alexander Chee

I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel. — Alexander Chee

My interest in women's voices started when I was in the boys' choir and we were singing in opera choruses. That was my first close-up experience with the female soprano voice. I was amazed at how it could be within the same scale but so different in quality. — Alexander Chee

I took in her shoes, the dark leather and bright red laces, the toes of the shoes like smirks and the high heels like stems or talons. They were cancan shoes. I'd never seen them before and so I stared at them. I'd — Alexander Chee

Ever since I'd been old enough to know about virtue in a woman, it had seemed like a bull's-eye painted on my head in rouge. — Alexander Chee

The secret to being a rider in the hippodrome wasn't just that you must be agile, or that you must be good with horses, or that you must be strong and steady as the horse careens to the far end of the arena and back with you riding on its back. It was that you must hide inside your costume a little of a killer's heart.
The animal will be tender with you, and you with it, but the animal never forgets that when what it wants for survival requires your death, it will become unafraid to kill you. And so you cannot forget this, either.
It is, on reflection, good training to be a courtesan. A woman of any kind. — Alexander Chee

When I was a boy and I sang, my voice felt to me like a leak sprung from a small and secret star hidden somewhere in my chest and whatever there was about me that was fragile disappeared when my mouth opened and I let the voice out. We learned, we were prisons for our voices. You could want to try and make sure the door was always opened ... We weren't something struck to make a tone. We were strike and instrument both. If you can hold the air and shake it to make something, you learn, maybe you can make anything. Maybe you can walk out of here on this thin, thin air. — Alexander Chee

The way some were entrapped into lives of prostitution, the way that something like marriage could rob them of their rights. — Alexander Chee

There was a question I wanted answered more than I wanted anything else, and it could take my life to answer it. This question was What could I be? This was what I wanted to know. — Alexander Chee

Alone with myself and my talent, I chose it in some way I never had before. I chose myself also. The person I was and had been all along, the one who had not belonged to the place where she was born, nor to the places she found along the way, the one always under the mask, here she came out and breathed the air and felt at home. I had always believed that to be this person might destroy me or the world, and so as the world seemed to end, this made the end of the world seem nearly a paradise. — Alexander Chee

It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction. — Alexander Chee

I resented the idea of being talented. I couldn't respect it - in my experience, no one else did. Being called talented at school had only made me a target for resentment. I wanted to work. Work, I could honor. — Alexander Chee

Why is it so loud when you cry from grief? Because it must be loud enough for the missing one to hear, though it never can be. Loud enough to scale the sky and the backs of angels, or to fall through the earth to where they rest. And so it is sometimes when I sing that the notes come from me as if I believed I could reach them where they rest, they sure of a reunion I still cannot imagine or believe in except, sometimes, in song. — Alexander Chee

Hate is love on fire, set out to burn like a flare on the side of the road. It says, stop here. Something terrible has happened. Envy is like, the skin you're in burns. And the salve is someone else's skin. — Alexander Chee

Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA. — Alexander Chee

There is light suddenly everywhere, the light of your life speaking to you. What it tells you is almost the same as what happened.

Never mind that almost isn't good enough; it's all you have. — Alexander Chee

I wanted to prepare for a life of sudden transformations, of enemies singing at you across the stage dressed in the costume of a lover. — Alexander Chee

So then, sometimes you are not out of ideas. Sometimes you are afraid of the idea you have. This idea, it is an imposter. It will ravage your life. Undo all your hard work. Destroy you. You're sure of it. At the least it will humiliate you.

Are you really not inspired or are you afraid of being the person who will write the thing that will come if you sit down with the idea you have? Who do you need to love you so much that you will hide this idea from you and act like it doesn't exist?

Which is to say, sometimes you need to be destroyed. The person you are is in the way and the person you will be is waiting on the other side of the shell that you call you. — Alexander Chee

Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change the limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible. — Alexander Chee

It was said she mourned her beauty, which people still spoke of as of a vanished champion from another age. She had buried herself alive in public, on — Alexander Chee

I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was! — Alexander Chee

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad. — Alexander Chee

When the earth opens up under your feet, be like a seed. Fall down; wait for the rain. — Alexander Chee

It was such a hard thing, this virtue, it seemed to me. Keeping it was like having to grip the knife by the blade and defend yourself with the hilt. Ever since I'd been old enough to know about virtue in a woman, it had seemed like a bull's-eye painted on my head in rouge. I was sure, as I was led away, I would be better off without it. It was better to be done with it and be gone. — Alexander Chee

My grandfather knows about hauntings, it occurs to me now. Here was where he knew his sisters, here was what he remembered, every day, in his Imperial school, as the Japanese grammar spread inside him, as he learned the language of the people who took his sisters and destroyed them. All his thoughts come to him in Japanese first, his dreams in Japanese also ... I think of how every single thing he says in Korean comes across a pause where the Japanese is stilled and the Korean brought forward. Each part of speech a rescue — Alexander Chee

her interest was not the beginning of a friendship but more of a measuring. She — Alexander Chee

And the gods did not kill for hubris-for hubris, they let you live long enough to learn. — Alexander Chee

a woman with a lover's impatience with the whole world, a woman who feared when she did not get what she wanted that it meant she was not loved by creation itself; her need for success at seduction was like her need for dinner or breakfast. When — Alexander Chee

I was trying to make a novel about something no one wanted to read about into something they couldn't put down or look away from. — Alexander Chee

As I get ready to buy a new computer, I'm stunned at all the many micro drafts, of different chapters and scenes and whatnot, that litter the hard drive. — Alexander Chee

A singer learned her roles for life - your repertoire was a library of fates held close, like the gowns in this closet, yours until your voice failed. — Alexander Chee

Writers aren't born, they're made
from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine. And sometimes tutelage. — Alexander Chee

Men often complain of the wickedness of women. Of how we delight in what power we have over their hearts. But they reign over everything else, so of course, they grudge us this, should we ever come to rule over this thing the size of their fist. — Alexander Chee

I could stand before him, be in his arms as I was just then, and still be lost to him, some phantom of a desire he cherished more than he cherished me, the woman he claimed to love. — Alexander Chee

Everything is already moving so very fast, but you need a great deal more speed than this to escape the earth's gravitational pull. Seven miles per second. More fuel, please. — Alexander Chee

In this world, some time ago, far past anyone's remembering,women as a kind had done something so terrible, so awful, so fantastically cruel that they and their daughters and their daughters' daughters were forever beyond forgiveness until the end of time- unforgiving, distrusted, enslaved, made to suffer for the least offenses committed against any man. What was remembered were the terms of our survival as a class: We were to be docile, beautiful,uncomplaining, pure, and failing that at the least useful.bin return we might be allowed something like a long life. But if we were not any of these things, but a man's reckoning, or if perchance we violated their sense of that pact, we would have no protection whatsoever and were to be treated worse than any wild dog or lame horse. — Alexander Chee

To survive, much less succeed, I learned I could not give myself over to either pleasure or misery in excess. Whatever you felt was not important. To — Alexander Chee

The storm is a glazier. Then fog passes through, touches the cold trees to add to the ice already there. Here the wind spins glass from the water it has stolen off the sea and the lakes, off the hair on my head and the breath out of my mouth, the storm takes the water from us all everywhere, to make of a mountain range a stained-glass depiction of a saint no one knows. — Alexander Chee

And I would tell him, as we rise into the air, The curse is not that we cannot choose our Fates.
The curse, the curse we all live under, is that we can. — Alexander Chee

Your health, when you have it, is invisible to you. I — Alexander Chee

She said this watching my eyes as if she were testing the edge of a blade on me. And so I made sure not to flinch. — Alexander Chee

SCHOOL BEGINS IN August this year. I live nearby, and so I walk and skip the bus. I read while I walk to school up the two hills, one sidewalk, a more or less straight line. I pretend the streets I pass through are empty. I have been reading about the Neutron Bomb. I want to be like that, radiant and deadly, a ghost of an impact, to pass through walls, to kill everyone, in flight among the empty houses, punching through molecules like a knife through a paper bag. See me. I am five feet and two inches tall. I am still thin, freckled, large eyes, small nose. My hair waves and grows long, to my neck. I pick flowers for my mother as I walk. The neighborhood kids call me Nature Boy. I want to die. Help — Alexander Chee

None of the young women who wanted her position knew what her position was. — Alexander Chee

This was my slender bridge to the future, and I stepped onto it as carefully as I could. — Alexander Chee

Everyone would tell me they couldn't identify with sexual abuse. No one says they can't identify with the tales of the Greek gods and goddesses because they don't live on Mt. Olympus. — Alexander Chee

And then she leaned back her head with the faintest smile and, tapping her chin, asked, Are you in love with him, this mystery composer? How can I be? I asked in return. I don't even know him. Almost every opera is about this, she said, her smile growing. Love before first sight. — Alexander Chee

You are never lost in sorrow, it seems to me, ever. You do know the way. In fact, you don't think there's any other. Sorrow seemed to me to be more like a road would through life, through the days of your life, like the old Roman ruins near the Tuileries or the rue d'Enfer -- underneath this life, but never really apart from it. — Alexander Chee

Each source that I read, I would look through the bibliography and the footnotes, and use that as a map for the next thing I would read. — Alexander Chee

I knew it was a risk but what I was after was a novel that is about the feeling that comes with a coincidence in real life - that you feel as if something divine has intervened and has arrived with a message. — Alexander Chee

She wanted only to be feared. I wanted to be feared and loved. I didn't want everything she had as she stood onstage that night. I wanted more. — Alexander Chee

There is a part of you, you see now, that is reckless. A part of you that still always wants to die but never really wants to go after it.
So it makes mistakes instead. Or it says, when trouble comes in and has lemonade, I wonder what this will look like. If I sit still. If I do nothing. — Alexander Chee

As writer pay declined and teacher pay also, we all started hanging out online. You could say online social networks cheapen our friendships or you could say we were cheapened by a plutocratic power grab and this is all we can afford. — Alexander Chee

Most written work is a conversation between the editor and the writer, that the writer essentially fulfills in public, and the editor provides the stage for that to happen as well as the prompts. — Alexander Chee

With my family background - my parents were both activists - writing about culture and politics came naturally. — Alexander Chee

Sorrow seemed to me to be more like a road wound through life — Alexander Chee

The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them. — Alexander Chee

I think you can never know what you can live without. I think you can never know what you will live through. Only when the disaster arrives and you are there does the depth of your real inner resources reveal itself, and not a moment before. — Alexander Chee

she looked at me as if a horse had wandered into the hall, and in commanding it with her eyes, she could get it to return to its stable. — Alexander Chee

Why was there never an opera that ended with a soprano who was free? — Alexander Chee

The ideal editor will hold you to the best of yourself in the piece. — Alexander Chee

The idea of a talent that was bigger than an artist's ability to choose to use it, that would dictate the artist's life more than the artist could dictate, was interesting to me. — Alexander Chee

Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you ... — Alexander Chee

I've been told it's hard to write about singing. I didn't realize that going into it. I might not have tried if I knew! — Alexander Chee

PhD, MFA, self-taught - the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success. — Alexander Chee

After his sisters were taken away, the Japanese occupying force sent my grandfather to Imperial Schools. My first language is Japanese, he tells me. English far away. Sometimes, right after he told me, I would look at him and wonder what it felt like, to have the print of your enemy all the way inside you, right into the way you shaped your thoughts. — Alexander Chee