“Thoughts are often false. A feeling's always real. Not true, just real”
―
Susan Choi,
Trust Exercise
“To David, love meant declaration. Wasn't that the whole point? To Sarah, love meant a shared secret. Wasn't that the whole point?” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“And right away her gaze went hard with the anger we always feel at the person who spoils our idea of ourself.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“Once you’re old enough to recognize a hole in yourself it’s too late for the hole to be filled.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“I didn't grasp that desire and duty could rival each other, least of all that they most often did.” ― Susan Choi, My Education
“All kids want such glamorous knowledge. The darkness of it. The hardness of it. The realness of it. The cold fact that life really is fucked. And Sarah, with her Morrissey T-shirts and her unfiltered Camels and her sleep deprivation and her willful compliance with sexual hungers, she's been asking for this awful dispossession, with one mind she's been hot on its trail, and now that she's got it she longs to go back. If she could only go back, and eat the sandwich her mother packed her, with its thoughtful tomato.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“So perhaps it was her grief I felt as I gazed on this child not mine, and not even much of a child anymore. Grief not for him, nor for Martha exactly, but for all my lost selves, which I liked to imagine were still somehow there, waiting for my return. But those selves were long gone. I would never be younger again. This was so simple it went without saying, but unsaid, one could try to forget it.” ― Susan Choi, My Education
“She was afraid to want things for herself. She didn’t think she deserved them.” ― Susan Choi
“Why are instants of reunion so empty? Perhaps because they are so anticipated, too muffled already at the moment of their coming with every previous imagining to make any mark of their own.They refer backwards, to all the length of time that has refined itself as the prologue to cataclysm, and to all the flawed imaginings themselves, in each of which this moment is strangely dilated, expansive, arrested” ― Susan Choi, American Woman
“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.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“that acting was truthful emotions in false circumstances.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“I always knew I was one of the ones who would leave.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“Obsession is an accidental haunting, by a person not aware she’s a ghost. I knew Sarah was my ghost, but she’d forgotten I even existed.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“Possibly first love, despite all the fuss, is only mating with ideas attached.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“Heartbreak doesn't flow through the heart but along that frail shallow canal of the sternum.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“Coup de foudre; perhaps it was real. One went from believing, when twenty, that it was the one kind of love that was real, to believing, once closer to forty, that it was not only fragile but false--the inferior, infantile, doomed love of twenty-year-olds. Somewhere between, the norms of one culture of love were discarded, and those of the other assumed. When did it happen, at midnight of one's thirty-first birthday? On the variable day that, while browsing a grocery-store aisle with a man, the repeating refrain of the rest of one's life for the first time resounds in one's ear?” ― Susan Choi, My Education
“At the moment, I think we each genuinely believed ourselves to be the protagonist, and the other a naive and pardonable walk-on whose role might even have a tragic end. Still, it was good to trade compassion in that large and chilly room, regardless if one of us, or perhaps both of us, would turn out to be mistaken.” ― Susan Choi, My Education
“We never know, when life reunites us with someone, how closely our stories will match.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“just drive. “Sarah, I want to share with you something. I think it will help you. Young people like you experience pain more intensely than those of us just a bit older. I speak of emotional pain. Your pain is greater, in duration and strength. It is harder to bear. This is not a metaphor. It is a fact, of physiology. Of psychology. Your emotional sensitivity—it is superior to that of your parents, your teachers. That is why these years of your life, when you are fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, are so difficult, but also so important. That is why developing your talent at this age is so crucial. This heightened emotional pain is a gift. A difficult gift.” Despite herself, she’s listening. “Are you saying,” she manages after a while, “that in the future, when I’m older, things won’t hurt as much?” “Yes, exactly. But Sarah, I am saying something else. Don’t turn away from the pain. When you are older, yes, you will be harder. That is a blessing and a curse.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“To David, love meant declaration. Wasn't that the whole point? To Sarah, love meant a shared secret. Wasn't that the whole point?” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“And right away her gaze went hard with the anger we always feel at the person who spoils our idea of ourself.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“Once you’re old enough to recognize a hole in yourself it’s too late for the hole to be filled.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“I didn't grasp that desire and duty could rival each other, least of all that they most often did.” ― Susan Choi, My Education
“All kids want such glamorous knowledge. The darkness of it. The hardness of it. The realness of it. The cold fact that life really is fucked. And Sarah, with her Morrissey T-shirts and her unfiltered Camels and her sleep deprivation and her willful compliance with sexual hungers, she's been asking for this awful dispossession, with one mind she's been hot on its trail, and now that she's got it she longs to go back. If she could only go back, and eat the sandwich her mother packed her, with its thoughtful tomato.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“So perhaps it was her grief I felt as I gazed on this child not mine, and not even much of a child anymore. Grief not for him, nor for Martha exactly, but for all my lost selves, which I liked to imagine were still somehow there, waiting for my return. But those selves were long gone. I would never be younger again. This was so simple it went without saying, but unsaid, one could try to forget it.” ― Susan Choi, My Education
“She was afraid to want things for herself. She didn’t think she deserved them.” ― Susan Choi
“Why are instants of reunion so empty? Perhaps because they are so anticipated, too muffled already at the moment of their coming with every previous imagining to make any mark of their own.They refer backwards, to all the length of time that has refined itself as the prologue to cataclysm, and to all the flawed imaginings themselves, in each of which this moment is strangely dilated, expansive, arrested” ― Susan Choi, American Woman
“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.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“that acting was truthful emotions in false circumstances.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“I always knew I was one of the ones who would leave.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“Obsession is an accidental haunting, by a person not aware she’s a ghost. I knew Sarah was my ghost, but she’d forgotten I even existed.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“Possibly first love, despite all the fuss, is only mating with ideas attached.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“Heartbreak doesn't flow through the heart but along that frail shallow canal of the sternum.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“Coup de foudre; perhaps it was real. One went from believing, when twenty, that it was the one kind of love that was real, to believing, once closer to forty, that it was not only fragile but false--the inferior, infantile, doomed love of twenty-year-olds. Somewhere between, the norms of one culture of love were discarded, and those of the other assumed. When did it happen, at midnight of one's thirty-first birthday? On the variable day that, while browsing a grocery-store aisle with a man, the repeating refrain of the rest of one's life for the first time resounds in one's ear?” ― Susan Choi, My Education
“At the moment, I think we each genuinely believed ourselves to be the protagonist, and the other a naive and pardonable walk-on whose role might even have a tragic end. Still, it was good to trade compassion in that large and chilly room, regardless if one of us, or perhaps both of us, would turn out to be mistaken.” ― Susan Choi, My Education
“We never know, when life reunites us with someone, how closely our stories will match.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
“just drive. “Sarah, I want to share with you something. I think it will help you. Young people like you experience pain more intensely than those of us just a bit older. I speak of emotional pain. Your pain is greater, in duration and strength. It is harder to bear. This is not a metaphor. It is a fact, of physiology. Of psychology. Your emotional sensitivity—it is superior to that of your parents, your teachers. That is why these years of your life, when you are fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, are so difficult, but also so important. That is why developing your talent at this age is so crucial. This heightened emotional pain is a gift. A difficult gift.” Despite herself, she’s listening. “Are you saying,” she manages after a while, “that in the future, when I’m older, things won’t hurt as much?” “Yes, exactly. But Sarah, I am saying something else. Don’t turn away from the pain. When you are older, yes, you will be harder. That is a blessing and a curse.” ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
