Susan Choi Quotes & Sayings

I couldn't let you believe we'd keep going, when we'd already lasted too long. — Susan Choi

I've never written a book with an outline or a predetermined theme. It's only in retrospect that themes or subjects become identifiable. That's the fun of it: discovering what's next. I'm often surprised by plot developments I would not have dreamed of starting out, but that, in the course of the writing, come to seem inevitable. — Susan Choi

The complexity of the world is so overwhelming and so present to everyone. — Susan Choi

Coup de foudre; perhaps it was real. One went from believing, when twenty, that it was the one kind of love that was real, to believing, once closer to forty, that it was not only fragile but false
the inferior, infantile, doomed love of twenty-year-olds. Somewhere between, the norms of one culture of love were discarded, and those of the other assumed. When did it happen, at midnight of one's thirty-first birthday? On the variable day that, while browsing a grocery-store aisle with a man, the repeating refrain of the rest of one's life for the first time resounds in one's ear? — Susan Choi

Something crossed his face, a pure motion like wind over water
I couldn't have guessed what emotion it was. "I'll miss you," he said. — Susan Choi

I've at times in my past been so unhappy, and thought, like, 'I would give anything for this not to be happening.' And, you know, as people say, time passes, and then you think, 'I'm kind of glad that happened to me.' — Susan Choi

Graduate school is a really supportive environment, but in a way, it was only when that support vanished that I flourished. — Susan Choi

So perhaps it was her grief I felt as I gazed on this child not mine, and not even much of a child anymore. Grief not for him, nor for Martha exactly, but for all my lost selves, which I liked to imagine were still somehow there, waiting for my return. But those selves were long gone. I would never be younger again. This was so simple it went without saying, but unsaid, one could try to forget it. — Susan Choi

The most shocking act, closely examined, is just a louder version of some habitual gesture. — Susan Choi

Why are instants of reunion so empty? Perhaps because they are so anticipated, too muffled already at the moment of their coming with every previous imagining to make any mark of their own.They refer backwards, to all the length of time that has refined itself as the prologue to cataclysm, and to all the flawed imaginings themselves, in each of which this moment is strangely dilated, expansive, arrested — Susan Choi

I was the daughter of an immigrant, raised to feel that I needed to get excellent, flawless grades and a full scholarship and a graduate degree and a good job - all the stepping stones to conventional success. — Susan Choi

I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages. — Susan Choi

I didn't grasp that desire and duty could rival each other, least of all that they most often did. — Susan Choi

My youth was the most stubborn, peremptory part of myself. In my most relaxed moments, it governed my being. It pricked up its ears at the banter of eighteen-year-olds on the street. It frankly examined their bodies. It did not know its place: that my youth governed me with such ease didn't mean I was young. It meant I was divided as if housing a stowaway soul, rife with itches and yens which demanded a stern vigilance. I didn't live thoughtlessly in my flesh anymore. My body had not, in its flesh, fundamentally changed quite so much as it now could intuit the change that would only be dodged by an untimely death, and to know both those bodies at once, the youthful, and the old, was to me the quintessence of being middle-aged. Now I saw all my selves, even those that did not yet exist, and the task was remembering which I presented to others. — Susan Choi

At the moment, I think we each genuinely believed ourselves to be the protagonist, and the other a naive and pardonable walk-on whose role might even have a tragic end. Still, it was good to trade compassion in that large and chilly room, regardless if one of us, or perhaps both of us, would turn out to be mistaken. — Susan Choi

If I'm not in the dead heat of working on something, I can end up spending tons and tons of time on the Web, and I hate it. I feel the same shame I did in grad school when I was pretty much addicted to reruns of 'Star Trek: The Next Generation'. I wish someone would make the Web just go away. Just remove it from the earth. — Susan Choi

I start with characters, and then I start writing, and then, if I'm lucky, things start to happen. — Susan Choi

I always try to avoid looking at the section where my books would be shelved, but I do know that my most reliable neighbor to the right is Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening', which is dispiriting. That's a book I don't want to re-read. — Susan Choi

Innocence as we understand it in our culture is very theatrical. The flip side is, if you're charming enough, you can get away with anything. — Susan Choi

It's still funny for me to think of myself as someone who writes historical fiction because it seems like a really fusty, musty term, and yet it clearly applies. — Susan Choi

I think 'Gatsby' is hobbled, in part, by its status as a Great American Novel. People kind of roll their eyes before they've even opened it, treat it with a 'been there, done that' attitude. I know I did. It took me years to re-open the novel and see how much I'd missed. — Susan Choi

I had opened the obvious drawer, the top drawer of the room's only dresser, and found myself gazing into a masculine cache of compressed, crumpled things. Wash-worn Brooks Brothers white cotton shorts now a pale shade of gray. Snake-tangled, unpaired argyle socks, all in bright Easter colors like clover ad mauve which still showed fairly crisp near the tops, but down toward the heels were marred by thread pills and snags, and at the toes by the outright abjection of holes. To see laid bare in their entirety those socks, of which I'd heretofore glimpsed only brief merry stripes, when a pant cuff rose up from the rim of a shoe, was like seeing the man himself fully exposed to me
naked. — Susan Choi

It's pathetic, but I don't really remember my first time reading 'The Great Gatsby.' I must have read it in high school. I'm pretty sure I remember it being assigned, and I generally did the reading. But I don't remember having a reaction to the book, even though I loved literature, and other works made a lasting impression on me at that age. — Susan Choi

All sorts of creative communities are withering in New York because it's too hard to live here. It's ridiculous how expensive it is. — Susan Choi

The very moment I admitted we were flirting, I lost patience for it. — Susan Choi

Appetite knows what it craves, without cerebral embellishment. It tends not to waste any time laying hold of its tools. That was the thing I had recognised here: appetite. I recognised it precisely because, in a context like this, it was so unfamiliar. It had forced me to rule out everything else. And there was a second reason for my recognition, which because unprecedented was not recognition at all, but astounding discovery: Martha's face told me. I saw appetite there ... — Susan Choi

And I remembered now, too, my inadvertent youthful condescension, when the woman had said, apologizing for some information she couldn't recall, "I still remember the coat I wore when I was five, but I have no idea what I ate for breakfast today." I'd laughed and smiled in warm sympathy. How sweet, I had thought, she remembers her coat. She must have loved it not to have forgotten. But the coat wouldn't ask any effort of preservation. Feeling ninety, and no longer five, there would be the real effort. Telling that five-year old girl, in her beautiful coat, You're all finished. Submerged. Obsolete.
We are ghosts of ourselves, and of others, and all of these ghosts appear perfectly real. — Susan Choi