Alexander Chee Quotes

He smiles at me, and it is a knock on my chest, as if he had reached out and rapped it. My chest opens, my heart admits him.

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 resented the idea of being talented. I couldn’t respect it — in my experience, no one else did. Being called talented at school had only made me a target for resentment. I wanted to work. Work, I could honor.

When writers in New York complained they could not write after 9/11, it seemed to me they were frozen by writing for that audience, by writing for the missing. Who we all felt, somehow, were watching. Waiting to see if we were worthy of being alive when they were dead. Waiting to see the stories we would tell about the life they would no longer have among us - waiting to see if it was worth it.

I jump down from my box. I am afraid he will be trampled. He is unconscious and not in view of the panicked crowd. I go to his side and find someone already there, pushing the box off him. I bend down and say his name softly. Mike, I say. His eyes open, and he is already crying. This is his first police riot, mine too. The blood is always heavy on any head wound, I say, remembering something random as I try to calm him. And I tear off a piece of my T-shirt to press against his head.

If Chopin’s Nocturne in F Minor, op. 55, no. 1 is like looking for a love lost in the darkness, this is the descent into love, in all its richness, mortifications, and subsequent glories.

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.

I think you can never know what you can live without. I think you can never know what you will live through. Only when the disaster arrives and you are there does the depth of your real inner resources reveal itself, and not a moment before.

I did something with my first novel that I think a lot of debut novelists do, which is they act as if it was a freak accident that they wrote it. They sort of disown it or whatever. When they’re like, well, you know, I don’t really know I did that, even though they worked for years to get the book done, get the book out. All of that. They don’t claim the victory. It somehow feels obnoxious to them or that they’re being a dick, or whatever sort of class background they come from doesn’t allow them to have that celebration or who knows…

Sorrow seemed to me to be more like a road wound through life

Had he himself ever felt Korean inside, for example? How would he know? Wouldn’t it just feel like . . . himself? Whatever he’d felt, it was probably not what Scott felt. But also, he was Korean American, not Korean, a distinction he had never been able to explain sufficiently to the white people in his life so far,

But inside the self performing as someone who was fine was the self who was not, and the vision I'd had of my life, the one that had me wanting to scream, was a vision of how living this way, inside of this performance, had blighted my life. I felt like a tree struck by lightning a long time ago, burning secretly from the inside out, the bark still smooth to the end — the word FINE painted on it.

...believing trouble is gone forever is the beginning of a special kind of trouble.

The year after that novel was published, I was invited to teach at Wesleyan. I congratulated myself on a completed plan on that first day of classes. I know some people condescend to me when I mention that I was once a waiter, but I will never regret it. Waiting tables was not just a good living, but also a good education in people. I saw things I never would have imagined, an education in life out past the limits of my own social class. Your imagination needs to be broken in, I think, to become anywhere near as weird as the world.

A novel, should it survive, protects what a missile can't.