Alexander Chee Quotes

I would look at him and wonder what it felt like, to have the print of your enemy all the way inside you, right into the way you shaped your thoughts.

I took in her shoes, the dark leather and bright red laces, the toes of the shoes like smirks and the high heels like stems or talons. They were cancan shoes. I’d never seen them before and so I stared at them. I’d

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.

I wanted to prepare for a life of sudden transformations, of enemies singing at you across the stage dressed in the costume of a lover.

Yes, everything's been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing makes it possible.

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.

I became something they couldn’t imagine, something they would have kept me from becoming, and that, it seems to me, was always in my nature to become.

My grandfather knows about hauntings, it occurs to me now. Here was where he knew his sisters, here was what he remembered, every day, in his Imperial school, as the Japanese grammar spread inside him, as he learned the language of the people who took his sisters and destroyed them. All his thoughts come to him in Japanese first, his dreams in Japanese also... I think of how every single thing he says in Korean comes across a pause where the Japanese is stilled and the Korean brought forward. Each part of speech a rescue

Whenever I am back in the neighborhood, I sometimes pass my apartment from the street. I like to believe, stupidly, that if I were to open the front door again, in the back I would find my roses, huge from their seaweed tea and the many days of six hours' sunlight, perhaps growing legs, ready to push down the building and walk out to the street, striking cars out of the way and slicing the blacktop to ribbons. I want to think that they would miss me, their erstwhile tormentor, the one who pushed them so hard to grow, cutting and soaking them in the blazing sun from spring to winter. From the street, from across the river, where I live now without them, I can feel them still, the sap pulsing in their veins, pushing their way to the sky.

But the creature that grew legs and walked away from the garden was me. I was not their gardener. They were mine.

Ever since I’d been old enough to know about virtue in a woman, it had seemed like a bull’s-eye painted on my head in rouge.

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.

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.

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.

It's a strange time to teach someone to write stories. But I think it always is. This is just our strange time.

Were he to put his hand on me, I would be revealed as nothing more than a newspaper, erect. A screen on which is projected the image of a boy. How could he love me? There's nothing to me except a place where the light resists moving forward. Okay, I say, instead. I will.