Quotes from Alexander Chee

A GOOD PLACE TO begin a garden is to undo whatever appear to be the clear mistakes of previous owners.

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

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

I still didn't know I had written it to do this, but then I did. I wish I could show you the roomful of people who've told me the novel is the story of their lives. Each of them as different as could be. I still don't know if I'd be in that room.

And while it never felt like love or community, it had almost felt like not being alone.

I loved him, in part, for what he might be someday, which is never a good way to love someone. It was in fact a way of rejecting him, a way of rejecting who he is now, and I think in some way we both knew this.

If anything, I was proud of it. I had endured I told myself. I was so strong. But this is not strength. It is only endurance. A kind of emotional or therapeutic anorexia. I was not strong. Or if I was, it was the adrenaline of the wounded. I was really only broken, moving through the landscape as if I were not, and taking all my pride in believing I was passing as whole.

I am built for this terrible pain, I told myself, and sent myself on my way.

That afternoon, I tried to understand if I had made a choice about what to write. But instead it seemed to me if anyone had made a choice, the novel had, choosing me like I was a door and walking through me out into the world.

Imagine yourself as a pool of light and sound altering as all your days run through you, and they pass again and again. From moment to moment, you are every age you have ever been, but in no particular order. Time courses through you, the time you lived, a flume of your days. This was Peter's dementia.

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

I sang it as a gift to the audience, to the composer, to me. I sang it as a taunt to the Fates, too. I was weary of my fears as well as my desires, and so I sang it in simple defiance of all of it, even defying myself.

In the occult, good manners matter, as they do in life, and perhaps even more so.

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.

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

We learn our first lessons about money as children, and these shape much of our ideas about it. We learn these lessons from our parents, but from others also. But I feel as if I have always been taught about money by everyone, every day of my life a lesson, whether I want it or not, in what money is and does.

The smile he gives Mr. Zhe on greeting is more intimate than a kiss hello.

To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth but into it. My job is to make something happen in a space barely larger than the span of your hand, behind your eyes, distilled out of all that I have carried, from friends, teachers, people met on planes, people I have seen only in my mind, all my mother and father ever did, every favorite book, until it meets and distills from you, the reader, something out of the everything it finds in you.

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.

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.

I was unsure how they fed themselves, what they would eat and drink, they were not unsure at all and this terrified me. I

What would you read to someone who was dying?" Annie Dillard had asked our class. She wanted this to be the standard for our work. There, at the memorial service for my friend, I thought of another: Dying, what stories would you tell?

If Chopin's Nocturne in F Minor, op. 55, no. 1 is like looking for a love lost in the darkness, this is the descent into love, in all its richness, mortifications, and subsequent glories.

All thirsts are without explanations, as are all loves.