Quotes from Susan Choi

Of course one feel san done knows what one feel sand at the same time is a master of feeling, not slave; feeling is the archive upon which we draw, but the archive has doors or perhaps it has drawers, it's got storage, an index, the metaphor for the archive of feelings has been lost on Sarah but she gets the idea. You're fucked if it isn't in order.

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...

She received the same love he extended to all humankind. He never upbraided her for leaving him, and this rationality of his, whether a put-on or not, was another shocking loss, though she knew it was enormously selfish to want the man that you no longer loved to keep pining for you. He finally, quietly let her go, let three months pass before answering one of her letters. She knew then to stop writing back.

It was part of the excruciating in-betweenness of no longer being children, yet lacking those powers enjoyed by adults.

The dictionary tells us that fiction is literature in the form of prose that describes imaginary events and people, is invention or fabrication, as opposed to fact. The dictionary tells us that the imaginary exists only in the imagination. Logic tells us that what exists only in the imagination does not exist in reality, or actuality, which the thesaurus tells us are the same thing.

perhaps meaning to pretend to have misheard, as people sometimes do to buy time, when they think that what matters is how they respond, and not the thing that has been said

The content was much like the form: exuberant with observation, and yet deftly measured. Each card made a little vignette.

She had expected this because they were adults. Yet she'd gone off with them because they didn't behave like adults, so that she couldn't understand, now, whether they'd deserted her or whether she'd been stupid to expect otherwise.

The school was meant to set apart, to break bonds that were better off broken, confined to childhood. Sarah and David accepted this as the sort of poignant rite their exceptional lives would require.

Their romance has started in earnest this summer, but the prologue took up the whole previous year. All fall and spring of the previous year they lived with exclusive reference to each other, and were viewed as an unspoken duo by everyone else.

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

Neither can drive.

Obsession is an accidental haunting, by a person not aware she's a ghost.

She'd stopped fighting and known, as Pauline must have known when she'd joined with her captors, that any bond is its own great salvation, no matter how damning in all other ways. She'd bound herself then to Pauline, and Pauline's rushing fate.

the Formula and had then become imprisoned by it: first Kissing with Tongue for the fixed interval, then Tits for the fixed interval, then Fingering Her for the fixed interval before, culminatingly, Fucking. Never a step neglected nor a change to the order. A sex recipe. Now with a shock he realized that it needn't be thus.

In space … no one can hear your bad jokes.

Mr. Kingsley was not just gay but an iconoclast, the first such they'd ever encountered. This was what they longed to be themselves, little though they could put into words. 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.

Therapy can seem like revision of memory. It can seem like you're saving your life by destroying your story and writing a new one. It can seem like therapy won't get its goddamn grubby mitts off you.

that opera, in fact, is the highest redemption of longing. That it's her own anguish, salvaged by music.

Cock and hands are precocious enough. They belong to a fortunate, confident man, and have traveled in time for unguessable reasons to append themselves to a teenager. Unlike them his mouth is not a foreign power; it's her own missing part.

All theatrical forms of movement - the 'silly walks' and pratfalls, but also the arm-swinging ('I am carefree!') and the deliberate direction-changing ('I am rouge!') - leach out of the room. Unexpected collectivity has slowly emerged in its place. Perhaps most important, embarrassment has been given up. Without their having noticed it, they're no longer embarrassed. Their speed has equalized until they're all traveling at the same rate.

I had never had a lover so unafraid of a future with me—and not just unafraid, but determined on it. The past didn't matter to Matthew because in the past, we had not been together—and this was a belief, like some religious beliefs, I suspected might benefit me if I shared it.

One of Karen's favorite authors...wrote a book that, once Karen had read it, enabled her to analyze her feeling-states as clearly as if they were passing through prisms, that didn't just make them visible but broke them down into all their components. Once you can do that, it's a challenge to not view other people as blind.

through the air, Sarah's glance darted out, then away, like a whip. Unbeknownst to themselves they were as noticeable as lighthouses. In repose, even when they both stared straight ahead, the wire ran between them, and their peers changed their paths to avoid tripping on it.