Alexander Chee Quotes

#1. her interest was not the beginning of a friendship but more of a measuring. She

Alexander Chee

#2. My interest in women's voices started when I was in the boys' choir and we were singing in opera choruses. That was my first close-up experience with the female soprano voice. I was amazed at how it could be within the same scale but so different in quality.

Alexander Chee

#3. A singer learned her roles for life - your repertoire was a library of fates held close, like the gowns in this closet, yours until your voice failed.

Alexander Chee

#4. 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.

Alexander Chee

#5. 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.

Alexander Chee

#6. There is light suddenly everywhere, the light of your life speaking to you. What it tells you is almost the same as what happened.

Never mind that almost isn't good enough; it's all you have.

Alexander Chee

#7. The way some were entrapped into lives of prostitution, the way that something like marriage could rob them of their rights.

Alexander Chee

#8. When the earth opens up under your feet, be like a seed. Fall down; wait for the rain.

Alexander Chee

#9. This was my slender bridge to the future, and I stepped onto it as carefully as I could.

Alexander Chee

#10. 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.

Alexander Chee

#11. To survive, much less succeed, I learned I could not give myself over to either pleasure or misery in excess. Whatever you felt was not important. To

Alexander Chee

#12. Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you ...

Alexander Chee

#13. Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change the limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible.

Alexander Chee

#14. I knew it was a risk but what I was after was a novel that is about the feeling that comes with a coincidence in real life - that you feel as if something divine has intervened and has arrived with a message.

Alexander Chee

#15. 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.

Alexander Chee

#16. I was trying to make a novel about something no one wanted to read about into something they couldn't put down or look away from.

Alexander Chee

#17. As writer pay declined and teacher pay also, we all started hanging out online. You could say online social networks cheapen our friendships or you could say we were cheapened by a plutocratic power grab and this is all we can afford.

Alexander Chee

#18. 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.

Alexander Chee

#19. With my family background - my parents were both activists - writing about culture and politics came naturally.

Alexander Chee

#20. It was said she mourned her beauty, which people still spoke of as of a vanished champion from another age. She had buried herself alive in public, on

Alexander Chee

#21. PhD, MFA, self-taught - 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.

Alexander Chee

#22. Writers aren't born, they're made
from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine. And sometimes tutelage.

Alexander Chee

#23. 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.

Alexander Chee

#24. Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.

Alexander Chee

#25. None of the young women who wanted her position knew what her position was.

Alexander Chee

#26. There was a question I wanted answered more than I wanted anything else, and it could take my life to answer it. This question was What could I be? This was what I wanted to know.

Alexander Chee

#27. The ideal editor will hold you to the best of yourself in the piece.

Alexander Chee

#28. And I would tell him, as we rise into the air, The curse is not that we cannot choose our Fates.
The curse, the curse we all live under, is that we can.

Alexander Chee

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

Alexander Chee

#30. The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.

Alexander Chee

#31. 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

Alexander Chee

#32. Most written work is a conversation between the editor and the writer, that the writer essentially fulfills in public, and the editor provides the stage for that to happen as well as the prompts.

Alexander Chee

#33. I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.

Alexander Chee

#34. It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

Alexander Chee

#35. a woman with a lover's impatience with the whole world, a woman who feared when she did not get what she wanted that it meant she was not loved by creation itself; her need for success at seduction was like her need for dinner or breakfast. When

Alexander Chee

#36. And the gods did not kill for hubris-for hubris, they let you live long enough to learn.

Alexander Chee

#37. Men often complain of the wickedness of women. Of how we delight in what power we have over their hearts. But they reign over everything else, so of course, they grudge us this, should we ever come to rule over this thing the size of their fist.

Alexander Chee

#38. Everyone would tell me they couldn't identify with sexual abuse. No one says they can't identify with the tales of the Greek gods and goddesses because they don't live on Mt. Olympus.

Alexander Chee

#39. Why was there never an opera that ended with a soprano who was free?

Alexander Chee

#40. The idea of a talent that was bigger than an artist's ability to choose to use it, that would dictate the artist's life more than the artist could dictate, was interesting to me.

Alexander Chee

#41. There is a part of you, you see now, that is reckless. A part of you that still always wants to die but never really wants to go after it.
So it makes mistakes instead. Or it says, when trouble comes in and has lemonade, I wonder what this will look like. If I sit still. If I do nothing.

Alexander Chee

#42. 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.

Alexander Chee

#43. Each source that I read, I would look through the bibliography and the footnotes, and use that as a map for the next thing I would read.

Alexander Chee

#44. 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.

Alexander Chee

#45. she looked at me as if a horse had wandered into the hall, and in commanding it with her eyes, she could get it to return to its stable.

Alexander Chee

#46. Your health, when you have it, is invisible to you. I

Alexander Chee

#47. As I get ready to buy a new computer, I'm stunned at all the many micro drafts, of different chapters and scenes and whatnot, that litter the hard drive.

Alexander Chee

#48. 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.

Alexander Chee

#49. I've been told it's hard to write about singing. I didn't realize that going into it. I might not have tried if I knew!

Alexander Chee

#50. I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

Alexander Chee

#51. I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!

Alexander Chee

#52. Hate is love on fire, set out to burn like a flare on the side of the road. It says, stop here. Something terrible has happened. Envy is like, the skin you're in burns. And the salve is someone else's skin.

Alexander Chee