Quotes from Susan Choi

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.

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?

Girls are complicated. They rarely love each other without also hating each other.

Love was some kind of of chemical error.

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

Is that some other creature with me, in the darkness?

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

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

He has already struck the match, his hands cupped to protect the small flame against the currents of the air but also to smuggle more of his body into the exchange, under cover of courtesy. Frazer always cups his hands around the flame and leans near, even when indoors in a place with no drafts. Some men embrace all the retrograde aspects of gallantry because they've intuited that to be gallant is to take sexual hold of a woman, however obliquely. She thinks Frazer is one of these men.

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.

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.

The loss of her freedom, of these years of her twenties, ended up being nothing next to the loss of her confidence in the choices she'd made.

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.

The vast southern city they lived in was rich in land, poor in everything else—no bodies of water, no drainage, no hills, no topographical variety of any sort, no public transportation or even the awareness of the lack of such a thing.

That glimpse, of herself alone at the heart of his gaze, only lasted an instant. His indifference to their audience struck her as a dare or a test. She didn't see as a counterindication to this angry idea of hers his hot blush as deep as her own; if her face was as red as a beet, his was red as a burn, he'd come out in lurid blotches that overlapped with his boy's patchy stubble to make a mess of his face.

She wasn't petty, she has never been petty, has never had enough self-possession, or possessed enough self, to afford pettiness, because petty is a way people are who have something to spare.

We almost never know what we know until after we know it.

Intuition only tells them what they want, not how to achieve it

Joelle is not convoluted but simple, not sullen but sunny, yet she has the extensive clandestine life of a career criminal, and this used to enthrall Sarah. Now Joelle appears stripped bare, her essence exposed. She's just a party girl, overeager to be liked.

Remember the impossible eventful ness of time, transformation and emotion packed like gunpowder into the barrel. Remember the dilation and diffusion, the years within days. Theirs were endless; lives flowers and died between waking and noon.

She lets it slip because she does. Don't ask her Why now? Ask her Why not every moment up to now?

I've been looking for that same secret message, that same confirmation that I matter most to whoever is sending the code.

You were supposed to stay with her in that moment, with tenacity and honesty. And that's what you did." "I wasn't honest. I lied!" "And you're aware of the lie, and aware of the reason you told it. You were there in that circumstance, Sarah. More then Joelle.

So much of what they do, with Mr. Kingsley, is restraint in the name of release. It seems they have to throttle their emotions to have complete access to them. Access to one's emotions = presence in the moment. Acting = responding with authentic emotion under made-up circumstances.