Susan Choi > Quotes

“Thoughts are often false. A feeling's always real. Not true, just real”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“To David, love meant declaration. Wasn't that the whole point? To Sarah, love meant a shared secret. Wasn't that the whole point?”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“And right away her gaze went hard with the anger we always feel at the person who spoils our idea of ourself.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“Once you’re old enough to recognize a hole in yourself it’s too late for the hole to be filled.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

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

“All kids want such glamorous knowledge. The darkness of it. The hardness of it. The realness of it. The cold fact that life really is fucked. And Sarah, with her Morrissey T-shirts and her unfiltered Camels and her sleep deprivation and her willful compliance with sexual hungers, she's been asking for this awful dispossession, with one mind she's been hot on its trail, and now that she's got it she longs to go back. If she could only go back, and eat the sandwich her mother packed her, with its thoughtful tomato.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“She was afraid to want things for herself. She didn’t think she deserved them.”
― 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, American Woman

“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, My Education

“Possibly first love, despite all the fuss, is only mating with ideas attached.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“Love was some kind of of chemical error.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“I always knew I was one of the ones who would leave.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“They were all children who had previously failed to fit in, or had failed, to the point of acute misery, to feel satisfied, and they had seized on creative impulse in the hope of salvation.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“Obsession is an accidental haunting, by a person not aware she’s a ghost. I knew Sarah was my ghost, but she’d forgotten I even existed.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“Heartbreak doesn't flow through the heart but along that frail shallow canal of the sternum.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“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, My Education

“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, My Education

“just drive. “Sarah, I want to share with you something. I think it will help you. Young people like you experience pain more intensely than those of us just a bit older. I speak of emotional pain. Your pain is greater, in duration and strength. It is harder to bear. This is not a metaphor. It is a fact, of physiology. Of psychology. Your emotional sensitivity—it is superior to that of your parents, your teachers. That is why these years of your life, when you are fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, are so difficult, but also so important. That is why developing your talent at this age is so crucial. This heightened emotional pain is a gift. A difficult gift.” Despite herself, she’s listening. “Are you saying,” she manages after a while, “that in the future, when I’m older, things won’t hurt as much?” “Yes, exactly. But Sarah, I am saying something else. Don’t turn away from the pain. When you are older, yes, you will be harder. That is a blessing and a curse.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“REMEMBER THE IMPOSSIBLE eventfulness of time, transformation and emotion packed like gunpowder into the barrel. Remember the dilation and diffusion, the years within days. Theirs were endless; lives flowered and died between waking and noon.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“It was part of the excruciating in-betweenness of no longer being children, yet lacking those powers enjoyed by adults.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“that acting was truthful emotions in false circumstances.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“We never know, when life reunites us with someone, how closely our stories will match.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“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, My Education

“What really pissed me off about what you wrote," Karen tried to tell Sarah as Sarah knelt screaming by Martin, as if Sarah had just one stage direction but was going to do it for all she was worth, "is how you wrote so much just like it happened, and then left out the actual truth. Why even do that? Who do you think you're protecting?”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“Girls are complicated. They rarely love each other without also hating each other.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“We almost never know what we know until after we know it.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“I couldn't let you believe we'd keep going, when we'd already lasted too long.”
― Susan Choi, My Education

“It was interesting, actually, how everyone’s primary feeling-state at that moment was disguised as a different emotion. Sarah’s repulsion at being reunited with Liam took the form of outrage at Martin. Liam’s passion for Sarah took the form of concern for Karen. And Karen’s unbearable humiliation, which she had always expected and never expected, took the form of emotionlessness and not caring. “I”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“The most shocking act, closely examined, is just a louder version of some habitual gesture. No one is ever “out of character.” That idea just makes Frazer laugh.”
― Susan Choi, American Woman

“Is that some other creature with me, in the darkness?”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise