Quotes from Susan Choi

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thoughts are often false. A feeling's always real. Not true, just real

To David, love meant declaration. Wasn't that the whole point? To Sarah, love meant a shared secret. Wasn't that the whole point?

And right away her gaze went hard with the anger we always feel at the person who spoils our idea of ourself.

Once you're old enough to recognize a hole in yourself it's too late for the hole to be filled.

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

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.

She was afraid to want things for herself. She didn't think she deserved them.

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.

that acting was truthful emotions in false circumstances.

I always knew I was one of the ones who would leave.

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.

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

Possibly first love, despite all the fuss, is only mating with ideas attached.

Heartbreak doesn't flow through the heart but along that frail shallow canal of the sternum.

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.

We never know, when life reunites us with someone, how closely our stories will match.