Olivia Sudjic Quotes & Sayings

It is 23.32 p.m. I still believe in symmetry, so this will be the last part. You've reached an end if you come back to where you started. I also remain superstitious about certain numbers. I use 23 and 32 for my lottery tickets, for example. It extends to dates. I still see signs. — Olivia Sudjic

But it is difficult to tell whether something is an oppurtunity or a trap when you are put on the spot. — Olivia Sudjic

From watching Silvia, I'd learned that one of the worst things about being ill is that most people find your suffering opaque. With this sadness it was different. I felt that I needed to nurture and protect it from people's understanding. I wanted Susy's sympathy because I wanted comfort and to feel less alone, and yet I also didn't want it - I didn't want my personal grief to be part of something universal right then. — Olivia Sudjic

I know I only want him,' she said between sobs, the syllables all wrong, 'because he doesn't want me. How is that even possible?'

'It's normal to want what we can't have,' I said soothingly.

'No, I mean how can he not want me? — Olivia Sudjic

I had shelved expectations of another kiss; the intensity of not kissing now worked almost as well - the proximity and denial. — Olivia Sudjic

But I do not know the people I am crying for anymore. I don't let myself sympathise - I think it would be wrong. — Olivia Sudjic

Waking in the morning, I had to remember grief all over again. It was sunny, a white winter sun, and that made me sad. — Olivia Sudjic

To me, it was clear proof of the existence of supersymmetry, the idea that every particle has a partner. She was mine. — Olivia Sudjic

He told me things about himself that should have made him sound urbane but did the opposite. He told me, for example, that he liked Steve Reich's music, modern-art museums, and Beat poetry. These words flew out of his mouth and went boomeranging back as if they knew they weren't meant to take the conversation anywhere but back to him. He also explained that he really liked interacting with different kinds of people. When I didn't immediately respond to this, he repeated it, and so I assured him I believed it. — Olivia Sudjic

She came back to me at 10.01 the next morning, a mirror time, as I'd expected. — Olivia Sudjic

She hasn't forgotten that I once called that thing she does, with the pins, Pinteresque. — Olivia Sudjic

No order, no pattern, just chaos. Lots of little universes separated by invisible screens . . . — Olivia Sudjic

Or maybe it was already too late; you only get one first love. She was mine, but I had not been hers. She was only going to look for some echo of it, and if I had made the right noises, that echo might have been me for a while. — Olivia Sudjic

Have you ever tried to organise a threesome in real life?'

I shook my head. I'd only encountered them in porn, but it seemed to happen without much admin, the same way all porn skipped out the granular details of sex, like condoms and kissing, that were supposed to happen in real life. — Olivia Sudjic

The emotional question became why Susy had rejected me. I was interested in that shift, from actively wanting to actively not wanting. — Olivia Sudjic

It was to do with the glazed look that always comes over me when faced with somebody who has offended or hurt me and yet whose approval I want. — Olivia Sudjic

That night I dreamt about the roses laid at the wrong feet - the feet of the nurse. Each bit of the dream was like a hyperlink. I pressed on one, wanting answers, and it took me to another. I could never get to the meaning at the bottom of any of the bits. When I reached for the petals of the roses, I was touching a metal seatbelt buckle in a coach, driving by night through a remote place, with a band of mist running parallel to the glass I leant against. — Olivia Sudjic

There was an extravagant winter storm outside. The tinfoil sky flashed beyond the window, rattling in the frame, and once or twice a white fork like a vein. Through the opposite window, which looked out onto the other side of the house, the light was pale, picking out where the wall was still broken from the last big storm, with the scorched telegraph pole and the burnt tree. — Olivia Sudjic

I was worried that if I told her the story, she would identify with it too much. That her sympathy, however well-meaning, would make me possessive, angry again. She was always making things personal, seeing only their relationship to her rather than what was complex about them. — Olivia Sudjic

Working out that I am not Mizuko has been an important step towards feeling better. If I have hit on a moral, it is this: the body is our natural barrier. There were lines I should not have crossed, and I did so without permission. I was looking always for correspondences, but meaning is found through difference. — Olivia Sudjic

As I lay, a pink, dreamlike glow seeped into the room, gradually turning a bright, chemical red. The light inched towards the bed, slowly picking out our two bodies - developing us, I thought, the way photographs used to be made - until it was daylight and everything had its normal definition. — Olivia Sudjic

Things which had at first felt like signs, if I analysed them for too long, ended up feeling like the movements of my own reflection in dark glass. — Olivia Sudjic

I had one of those flashes - the sea-glass feel of a well-worn phrase. — Olivia Sudjic

She was limp and pathetic and woozy and I loved her, I realised, even more because I knew how completely it was doomed. — Olivia Sudjic

I hope when this is done I'll be able to get back into my happy gardening vibe that was so healthy for me. I want to go back to my routine and my morning ritual with the compost, but it will probably be that my life will split in two. New Leaf Gardening in Wood Green will be happening in parallel to a fantasy that runs along the bottom of that screen like a ticker. Alice will be fine. Rabbit will stay up tonight, and every night. Resending and resending, reopening the page to see if she has responded, if anyone has. The spinning wheel will make my eyes hurt and everything else will go dark. — Olivia Sudjic

There was never one truth. Even the Higgs could still be used to prove opposing theories, its mass falling between them on a chart. Besides, I told myself, my breathing heavy, eyes widening until they bulged, I was post-truth. — Olivia Sudjic

Yeah!' I said again, widening my eyes and nodding slowly but emphatically to show that she had seen into my own symmetrical soul. — Olivia Sudjic

Some people in the town did not seem to care about the festival and were watching football on TV. The players were dotted about in neon green. They looked unreal, the way they might be seen by the forgotten man in the moon and the rabbit if they were watching the floodlit pitch forlornly from above. — Olivia Sudjic

It never ceased to amaze me how she just had the facts always, in her head. It occured to me that if, or when, she died, a whole load of facts, a body of knowledge, might disappear without a trace. — Olivia Sudjic

She was convinced a word existed, a noun, that meant the loss of feelings for someone who was formerly loved - a word for the act of falling out of love. I said I couldn't think of it. It wasn't in the dictionary either, not the one she wanted. — Olivia Sudjic

Tokyo was a place you could quite happily exist alone and be self-contained. It seemed to promise that it was better to be by yourself. — Olivia Sudjic

Though I did not know her exact address, that she appeared to live almost within breathing distance of Robin, and that I lived with him, and that her pictures showed that she was now dating the mysterious Rupert Hunter, our despotic mothers, our absent fathers, the borders we had both crossed, all our many parallels and connections at every point, could not be chance. I saw it as evidence of the hidden connections between things, an all-powerful algorithm that sifted through chaos, singling out soulmates. — Olivia Sudjic

Man with goatee. Man who looked like a Beatle. All the Beatles at once. Woman wearing newspaper hat. I'd grown used to how weird New Yorkers were, and I could fit them into types. — Olivia Sudjic

Roses are like kamikaze love pilots.
Roses are like suicide love bombers. — Olivia Sudjic

My ability to make up lies on the spot chills me as much as it saves me. — Olivia Sudjic

I couldn't decide what kind of person she was, whether she was one of those insects that look exactly like wasps but aren't . . . I just wanted to know if she would sting. — Olivia Sudjic

I had never been tempted to take drugs of any kind and especially not mind-altering ones, but when Mizuko introduced me to Provigil, which she described as mind-enhancing, I took two. — Olivia Sudjic

I saw a doctor. I went in case there were any remnants of the summer inside me - sticky, slender fish bones that needed to be scraped into the bin. He was dismissive of my concerns and said my body would have let me know by now. Did I have what was known as female intuition? I said I'd had my feminine intuition somewhat scrambled in the past. — Olivia Sudjic

I asked to use the bathroom and sat, recovering, on the edge of a marble bath on a dais - the kind Greek husbands are slain in. — Olivia Sudjic

I felt the nauseous shiver in my stomach - everything from rage to empathy to morning sickness - that I had grown used to and now thought of as being love. — Olivia Sudjic

It's hard to explain how an infatuation actually starts. It's a state so all-encompassing that it's almost impossible to remember how it felt to live inside your own head before it began. Everything that precedes it becomes a pathway that was always leading there. Time before is valuable only as a resource with which to create a persona, to bind the object of the infatuation closer. I had given my (partially fabricated) past life to Mizuko to make a story that in the end never got told. Or not by her. It is also hard to explain the intensity of the infatuation itself. There is rarely an explanation that seems reasonable to anyone but you. Unless you're part of a cult or viral phenomenon, so that when you weep outside the object of your infatuation's hotel room, you do so in the company of millions. — Olivia Sudjic

I found it hard to write the bits where the things that were at first surprising or even shocking became normal incrementally until I couldn't see that they were anything but normal, because everything else had shifted just one centimetre here and one centimetre there, moving at the speed fingernails grow, until finally everything just clicked into exactly the wrong place. — Olivia Sudjic

I watched us without interest, heard us only faintly, like strangers below my window. — Olivia Sudjic

Have you ever truly, keenly felt like you don't know who you are? Do you ever do something and think, Who is at the controls? Like some mad pilot has locked you out of the cockpit? I definitely do. I feel a kind of vertigo that makes me shake afterwards. I guess we all feel it when making a difficult-seeming choice, and sometimes you seriously don't know what you want because you don't know who you're supposed to be, or who you want to be. Physics, my first and second families, my philosophy degree, had all failed to help me answer that question. The former has led me to wonder whether I am one of an infinite number of Alices in multiple universes. A quantum fuck-up, which is someone who fucks up in every one of those universes but in different ways. — Olivia Sudjic

Maybe, as Mizuko said, we won't even really die, just carry on in the feedback loop we are stuck in. Instead of connecting with new things, widening our worlds, algorithms have shrunk it to a narrow chamber with mirrored walls. — Olivia Sudjic

But you'd hope anyone would feel sympathy if they actually saw someone face to face, pleading for a chance. — Olivia Sudjic

I don't know, I can't know, but I almost did. — Olivia Sudjic

Instantly I remembered everything I hated about him. But it was, in a way, comforting to know that he had not changed at all. — Olivia Sudjic

I sank back, deeper into the parallel universe I had found. — Olivia Sudjic

So there was no explicit bonding. Certainly not the kind you might be expecting if you like films like The Parent Trap as much as Mizuko and I did. We watched it together once, and I dared to say that we were like two little Lindsay Lohans in the isolation cabin, to which she made a kind of grunt. — Olivia Sudjic

I felt my own self-sufficiency, my own Walden Pond, seeping out of me as if I'd sprung a leak. Self soaked into everything around me - the floor, the walls, the one window, the grass. The words on the page. — Olivia Sudjic

The sharp, superficial pain at being spoken to unkindly had obscured the deeper pain, which had not yet turned into something hard and heavy. — Olivia Sudjic

Since I've moved here a Chinese takeaway on the main street has ominiously renamed itself from whatever it was before to the Golden Bowl, but other than that, the landscape is the last place on earth that might call Mizuko to mind. — Olivia Sudjic

Email is the scourge of our age,' said Silvia. 'Email and cancer. — Olivia Sudjic

When he wasn't making quirky jokes about his mother like this - it happened more than once - he mainly spoke at me, about his job and about his band, Jettisoned Airplane, an electronic music duo, which had been formed in March, inspired by the plane that had gone missing and not yet been found. — Olivia Sudjic

My reflections amount to a love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there. The things for which she was not there have her in them now more deeply because of her absence, and her effect on my way of seeing them. Anytime I note her absence from a thing, she arrives at once, as if summoned, entrenching herself more deeply than she exists in my memories of times when she was there, so that time, the sequence of what really happened, seems to curve around her. — Olivia Sudjic

I wondered how best to demonstrate that we were kindred spirits. — Olivia Sudjic

They seemed to despise each other, with a kind of loyalty. — Olivia Sudjic

The street had that sad summertime feeling that you want to push on to see why it hurts. — Olivia Sudjic

I also found it hard to accept the Mizuko I'd known in multiple miniatures was one physical person. I suppose it would feel the same waking up in bed with Jesus or Father Christmas, or any long-dead figurehead of an ancient cult. You know every word of every doctrine off by heart and then you see their toenails, gums, and vertebrae, not in pieces but all held together, and it's hard not to lose your shit. — Olivia Sudjic

Mizuko wonders if the GPS is still monitoring their progress. She has the distinct feeling of being watched by something in the darkness. This makes watching the footage and reading the story at the same time a strange experience, as if she can sense me, a menace from the future, following them along the dark road. — Olivia Sudjic

We had, I felt, bared small pieces of our symmetrical souls to each other, fast, as if playing one of those breathless card games, and I had pretended to be as moved as I had been the first time I uncovered it all myself, back in East Hampton. — Olivia Sudjic

So there is a before and there is an after. That isn't made up. But it's just a passage of time, no big change that changes everything. — Olivia Sudjic

The whole time I hadn't slept with anyone at university had made it harder and harder to finally do it. Like spending too long on a very high diving board, until finally you have to exit ignominiously, the same way you climbed up. — Olivia Sudjic

In the last week I felt her withdrawing. What was once everywhere, an ocean I imagined myself to be drowning in, was now barely deep enough to bathe in. I saw her warmth draining away and I couldn't stop it. — Olivia Sudjic

At first, sending the confession by real mail had felt like a genius device. I would not have to sit by my phone and watch for the signs that indicated it had been sent and seen. Slim but solid paper would, I hoped, convey me better. Now I had to consider the very real frailties of the system. Ludicrous, in fact, to entrust something of such magnitude to a mailman. A perfect stranger. I looked up stories of nefarious New York mailmen. There was one who has willfully upturned the lives of ordinary people like myself by hoarding 40,000 pieces of undelivered mail. The city was crawling with thieves and malcontents. — Olivia Sudjic

When she did walk, to the bathroom between the chairs and the customers leaning back in them, oblivious to her manoeuvres, the sight felt strangely moving and profound, like a baby, or a veteran getting out of a wheelchair, or a deer in snow. That is perhaps overdoing it. Maybe I didn't quite know that at the time, but it was striking. If you have not seen a deer in snow, I mean: moving with precision, but as if she might leap away in a completely different direction at any moment. — Olivia Sudjic

And yet how treacherous, I thought, after such neutrality, bordering on indifference, and occaisonally open hostility, when the whole city finally seemed alive and tremulous to my touch, a seething structure reaching out to meet me and accommodate my every move, as if I had been expected and was welcome there, that she was the only thing in it that would not respond. — Olivia Sudjic

I no longer felt I could try to belong with these people. — Olivia Sudjic

For a while this seemed to do the trick, and I felt that whatever contamination I had helped to spread, the boundaries I had helped to break, sprinkling flakes of myself all over the surface of New York like so much fish food, had been forgiven. — Olivia Sudjic

I began to cry but maintained my shouting through it, like a wind through sheets of rain. — Olivia Sudjic

The sensation that had plagued me after graduating, of being on the outside of some mystery, peeking in, returned. — Olivia Sudjic

The messages must be stuck somewhere in the tube of light underneath the ocean that connects London and New York. — Olivia Sudjic

A neon-pink 3 flickered and instantly disappeared again into the dark. The sight of it on my own device now made me sick. I held my finger down on the menu screen; each little app logo began to vibrate. I deleted the 3. I contemplated deleting everything. Cleaning it all away. The idea had a charm, a self-cancellation, many little suicides, a way to dispatch myself without actually going anywhere. — Olivia Sudjic

Suddenly I had to laugh. It was like realising you definitely need to projectile vomit when you thought you had it under control in some imprisoning form of public space. — Olivia Sudjic

Mizuko loved reading the dictionary. She liked it when there were multiple meanings for words and when opposite meanings could be contained. — Olivia Sudjic

I don't want to alarm anyone, but everywhere we go I see Alec Baldwin. It's like he's following us. — Olivia Sudjic

Yes,' she said, her nod and smile so American and so misleading. 'You are not supposed to be here - you're supposed to be there. — Olivia Sudjic

He had deduced also that I was quirky and promised me that he was too. — Olivia Sudjic

The glow of the steetlamps sat heavy and thick above me. As I walked aimlessly, in the direction of downtown, I returned to my theories. That Mizuko and I shared the pictorial equivalent of DNA. That a sympathetic magic existed between us, no matter how far apart we were pulled. That we defied physical laws of time and space, waves, gravity, the rules laid down by physicists which governed our physical universe (earthquakes, tsunamis) and physical bodies. And yet somehow our connection had led to the opposite of intimacy. My search had led to its opposite. I had never felt so isolated and disconnected, even from myself. — Olivia Sudjic

The rejection was bigger than the present moment itself. — Olivia Sudjic

I couldn't think of a reply except No, so I said, 'Sure. — Olivia Sudjic

It continues to impress me how fluently Americans, even immigrants like her, speak of their achievements. — Olivia Sudjic

I saw her note the way I hovered over the various ethnicities on the form. First the 'white' box, then to the airspace over the 'black' box, a kind of momentary hesitation, a protest of stillness, a staring into the abyss of everything I did not know about myself. She, like me, was made of halves. — Olivia Sudjic

We rarely get the chance to see things anew. I remember a Latin translation that caused me to fail an exam at school because one of the words, translated for us at the bottom of the page and intended to help, was invalid. I read this to mean false, null, illegal. The opposite of valid. But it was meant to be understood as invalid as in a sick person. It torpedoed my entire translation. Instead of tending to the sick, priests were being accused of fraudulence and neglecting their duties. Even though it didn't match up with the grammar, or the story, I kept on returning to that word to check, and every time I saw it only as I had done already - invalid, null, void. — Olivia Sudjic

Well, then, what's the plan now? You can't stay here forever.'

My plan was indeed to stay there forever. — Olivia Sudjic

But I can't help thinking of the shock I felt when I finally realised it was winter, on exiting Mizuko's apartment. The summer was long gone, but I hadn't noticed until then. — Olivia Sudjic

Yes, I think he even has a title. He's like son and heir.'

I turned her words over in my mind as I pretended to play with my phone.

Sun and hair
Son and heir
Sun and air — Olivia Sudjic

I went back to my room and spent all night contemplating whether it was possible in life not to be constantly let down. If it could ever be worth pinning your happiness to another person, when all other people ever seemed to do was disappear. — Olivia Sudjic

When I read it now it's like I have broken into a reality that is not mine, and when I step out of it, as if I had removed my headphones and heard the city again, it is easy to close the door behind me. — Olivia Sudjic

I was on the sidewalk, buffering, wondering if it was okay to follow people in real life. — Olivia Sudjic

Was this what the city would look like when knowledge was no longer enough? When the desire to turn inward, surrendering entirely to one's own private world of nonresistance, overwhelmed, like creeping ivy, our desire to know worlds beyond it? — Olivia Sudjic

She told me it was unlucky to share a reading with others, but the main point, the one I don't mind mentioning because it seems relevant to the story, is that she said I had a kind of evil spirit following me. 'Obviously,' she added, 'that sucks. But if we get you some amber - — Olivia Sudjic

I became convinced that I was being watched.

Because self was still leaking everywhere, a part of me began to think it was Mizuko rather than a stranger. I hoped that there might still be a reunion. I hoped it in the shy, sly way hope comes out of the jar, the mistranslated box, last - after everything and everyone else has escaped. — Olivia Sudjic

The city is tricky. The highs are so much higher, but in the lows you drop straight down again to bedrock. It helps that streets are snapped to a grid. There are also psychic boutiques and sidewalk prophets, but until you contrive your own love story set in that city, even one as warped as mine, you remain outside it, looking for signals in the white smoke that rises from under, in the sudden hot laundry smells and the LED typos of street vendors donuteasily becomes dount, ominously like don't, to my mind. There was a DOUNT sign on Second Avenue which more than once redirected my superstitious footsteps. — Olivia Sudjic

Begin at the beginning. Know nothing. Tabula rasa. At the same time, part of me wanted to distinguish myself. To let her sense the bond we shared straightaway. Maybe subtly hint at some of my secret intelligence. A secret handshake. A nod. I now completely understood how criminal masterminds could so easily get caught before the big reveal - the temptation to boast about the execution was huge. — Olivia Sudjic

The situation got worse when they came back to her apartment after and someone put on music. An advert interrupted during a moment when I was the person nearest the laptop, and so somebody said to me - quite threateningly, I felt - Put something else on. Obviously I forgot every song I have ever heard in my entire life. In one swift tug, like the tablecloth trick where everything is supposed to remain on the table gone wrong, every name of every artist disappeared too. The only keywords I could think of were the ones on a toy keyboard-and-tape-recorder combo I'd been given as a child, and I hadn't known their meaning even then. Bossa nova, for example.

I said I couldn't think of anything, any music, except silence, and retreated to the corner of the room, pretending to busy myself by scouring the bookcase there, which held little gatherings of figurines as well as Mizuko's many books. — Olivia Sudjic

Man had such impenetrable means to stop the outside world from coming in, and so little to stop our inside world from surging out, wrestling any foreign object into submission. — Olivia Sudjic

The sky was always full of birdsong and evening smells, piano music from a window, the stone buildings glowing against the blue, like cream poured over something tart and hot. — Olivia Sudjic

If everything stays the same, it seems possible for someone to come back. — Olivia Sudjic