Best 11 quotes of Susan Choi on MyQuotes

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

Innocence as we understand it in our culture is very theatrical. The flip side is, if youre charming enough, you can get away with anything.

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.

Ive at times in my past been so unhappy, and thought, like, I would give anything for this not to be happening. And, you know, as people say, time passes, and then you think, Im kind of glad that happened to me.

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

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...

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

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

In high school, Karen and Sarah had done everything to their hair they could think of except take care of it. They had bleached it, shaved it, permed it, dyed it, as girls do when vandalizing themselves seems the best way of proving their bodies were theirs.

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.

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