Alexander Chee Quotes

If I seem cagey, it is because I am not a liar and hate being considered one, due to an accident of craft. But also, if I tell you the idea, and the description disappoints you, the novel can be lost.

...the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure and success.

She wanted only to be feared. I wanted to be feared and loved. I didn't want everything she had as she stood onstage that night. I wanted more.

Writing fiction is an exercise in giving a shit — an exercise in finding out what you really care about.

Poison, in my experience, is always hidden; it seems to me we never know its color.

The enormity of what had happened was not yet clear, but I decided if the world was going to end that day, I was going to need coffee to face it.

All thirsts are without explanations, as are all loves.

Their whole difficult lives seemed not to weigh on them at all. Taken as mornings and meals, suppers and evenings, all of the world could be carried, both the sad and the delicious, their lives seemed to say.

And then she leaned back her head with the faintest smile and, tapping her chin, asked, Are you in love with him, this mystery composer? How can I be? I asked in return. I don’t even know him. Almost every opera is about this, she said, her smile growing. Love before first sight.

You could mistake your ability to go this far for strength. So you go on. Strength is admirable, after all, and you are ashamed of everything else about yourself. This endurance at least — this you can admire.

Everything is already moving so very fast, but you need a great deal more speed than this to escape the earth's gravitational pull. Seven miles per second. More fuel, please.

What would you read to someone who was dying? Annie Dillard had asked our class. She wanted this to be the standard for our work. There, at the memorial service for my friend, I thought of another: Dying, what stories would you tell?

Sometimes, I think I know what my grandparents were listening for. Sound waves don't ever go away. Not one sound goes away. The wave simply expands, infinitely. The sound remains. Imagine a cosine arc the size of Jupiter, and that might be the size of the wave of the last thing Peter ever said. I'd need an ear the size of another solar system to hear him again.

I cleared my throat and found my voice then, like a coin suddenly in your pocket that’d been missing when last you looked for it. Ernesto’s

What we lose with each death, though, is more like stars falling out of the sky and into the sea and gone. The something undone, the something that won’t ever be done, always remains unendurable to consider. A permanent loss of possibility, so that what is left is only ever better than nothing, but the loss is limitless.