Top 77 Olivia Sudjic Quotes
#1. But I can't help thinking of the shock I felt when I finally realised it was winter, on exiting Mizuko's apartment. The summer was long gone, but I hadn't noticed until then.
Olivia Sudjic
#2. I saw her note the way I hovered over the various ethnicities on the form. First the 'white' box, then to the airspace over the 'black' box, a kind of momentary hesitation, a protest of stillness, a staring into the abyss of everything I did not know about myself. She, like me, was made of halves.
Olivia Sudjic
#3. I went back to my room and spent all night contemplating whether it was possible in life not to be constantly let down. If it could ever be worth pinning your happiness to another person, when all other people ever seemed to do was disappear.
Olivia Sudjic
#4. No order, no pattern, just chaos. Lots of little universes separated by invisible screens . . .
Olivia Sudjic
#5. I had one of those flashes - the sea-glass feel of a well-worn phrase.
Olivia Sudjic
#6. I know I only want him,' she said between sobs, the syllables all wrong, 'because he doesn't want me. How is that even possible?'
'It's normal to want what we can't have,' I said soothingly.
'No, I mean how can he not want me?
Olivia Sudjic
#7. Have you ever tried to organise a threesome in real life?'
I shook my head. I'd only encountered them in porn, but it seemed to happen without much admin, the same way all porn skipped out the granular details of sex, like condoms and kissing, that were supposed to happen in real life.
Olivia Sudjic
#8. Tokyo was a place you could quite happily exist alone and be self-contained. It seemed to promise that it was better to be by yourself.
Olivia Sudjic
#9. In the last week I felt her withdrawing. What was once everywhere, an ocean I imagined myself to be drowning in, was now barely deep enough to bathe in. I saw her warmth draining away and I couldn't stop it.
Olivia Sudjic
#10. I couldn't think of a reply except No, so I said, 'Sure.
Olivia Sudjic
#11. There was never one truth. Even the Higgs could still be used to prove opposing theories, its mass falling between them on a chart. Besides, I told myself, my breathing heavy, eyes widening until they bulged, I was post-truth.
Olivia Sudjic
#12. Waking in the morning, I had to remember grief all over again. It was sunny, a white winter sun, and that made me sad.
Olivia Sudjic
#13. The whole time I hadn't slept with anyone at university had made it harder and harder to finally do it. Like spending too long on a very high diving board, until finally you have to exit ignominiously, the same way you climbed up.
Olivia Sudjic
#14. But it is difficult to tell whether something is an oppurtunity or a trap when you are put on the spot.
Olivia Sudjic
#15. When he wasn't making quirky jokes about his mother like this - it happened more than once - he mainly spoke at me, about his job and about his band, Jettisoned Airplane, an electronic music duo, which had been formed in March, inspired by the plane that had gone missing and not yet been found.
Olivia Sudjic
#16. I was on the sidewalk, buffering, wondering if it was okay to follow people in real life.
Olivia Sudjic
#17. Yes, I think he even has a title. He's like son and heir.'
I turned her words over in my mind as I pretended to play with my phone.
Sun and hair
Son and heir
Sun and air
Olivia Sudjic
#18. Man with goatee. Man who looked like a Beatle. All the Beatles at once. Woman wearing newspaper hat. I'd grown used to how weird New Yorkers were, and I could fit them into types.
Olivia Sudjic
#19. Was this what the city would look like when knowledge was no longer enough? When the desire to turn inward, surrendering entirely to one's own private world of nonresistance, overwhelmed, like creeping ivy, our desire to know worlds beyond it?
Olivia Sudjic
#20. So there is a before and there is an after. That isn't made up. But it's just a passage of time, no big change that changes everything.
Olivia Sudjic
#21. The sharp, superficial pain at being spoken to unkindly had obscured the deeper pain, which had not yet turned into something hard and heavy.
Olivia Sudjic
#22. When I read it now it's like I have broken into a reality that is not mine, and when I step out of it, as if I had removed my headphones and heard the city again, it is easy to close the door behind me.
Olivia Sudjic
#23. Some people in the town did not seem to care about the festival and were watching football on TV. The players were dotted about in neon green. They looked unreal, the way they might be seen by the forgotten man in the moon and the rabbit if they were watching the floodlit pitch forlornly from above.
Olivia Sudjic
#24. The sensation that had plagued me after graduating, of being on the outside of some mystery, peeking in, returned.
Olivia Sudjic
#25. Yes,' she said, her nod and smile so American and so misleading. 'You are not supposed to be here - you're supposed to be there.
Olivia Sudjic
#26. I sank back, deeper into the parallel universe I had found.
Olivia Sudjic
#27. Since I've moved here a Chinese takeaway on the main street has ominiously renamed itself from whatever it was before to the Golden Bowl, but other than that, the landscape is the last place on earth that might call Mizuko to mind.
Olivia Sudjic
#28. She was convinced a word existed, a noun, that meant the loss of feelings for someone who was formerly loved - a word for the act of falling out of love. I said I couldn't think of it. It wasn't in the dictionary either, not the one she wanted.
Olivia Sudjic
#29. Mizuko loved reading the dictionary. She liked it when there were multiple meanings for words and when opposite meanings could be contained.
Olivia Sudjic
#30. I felt my own self-sufficiency, my own Walden Pond, seeping out of me as if I'd sprung a leak. Self soaked into everything around me - the floor, the walls, the one window, the grass. The words on the page.
Olivia Sudjic
#31. As I lay, a pink, dreamlike glow seeped into the room, gradually turning a bright, chemical red. The light inched towards the bed, slowly picking out our two bodies - developing us, I thought, the way photographs used to be made - until it was daylight and everything had its normal definition.
Olivia Sudjic
#32. Instantly I remembered everything I hated about him. But it was, in a way, comforting to know that he had not changed at all.
Olivia Sudjic
#33. Well, then, what's the plan now? You can't stay here forever.'
My plan was indeed to stay there forever.
Olivia Sudjic
#34. It continues to impress me how fluently Americans, even immigrants like her, speak of their achievements.
Olivia Sudjic
#35. I couldn't decide what kind of person she was, whether she was one of those insects that look exactly like wasps but aren't . . . I just wanted to know if she would sting.
Olivia Sudjic
#36. Things which had at first felt like signs, if I analysed them for too long, ended up feeling like the movements of my own reflection in dark glass.
Olivia Sudjic
#37. She hasn't forgotten that I once called that thing she does, with the pins, Pinteresque.
Olivia Sudjic
#39. Man had such impenetrable means to stop the outside world from coming in, and so little to stop our inside world from surging out, wrestling any foreign object into submission.
Olivia Sudjic
#40. Email is the scourge of our age,' said Silvia. 'Email and cancer.
Olivia Sudjic
#41. I had never been tempted to take drugs of any kind and especially not mind-altering ones, but when Mizuko introduced me to Provigil, which she described as mind-enhancing, I took two.
Olivia Sudjic
#42. Yeah!' I said again, widening my eyes and nodding slowly but emphatically to show that she had seen into my own symmetrical soul.
Olivia Sudjic
#43. The messages must be stuck somewhere in the tube of light underneath the ocean that connects London and New York.
Olivia Sudjic
#44. I had shelved expectations of another kiss; the intensity of not kissing now worked almost as well - the proximity and denial.
Olivia Sudjic
#45. I was worried that if I told her the story, she would identify with it too much. That her sympathy, however well-meaning, would make me possessive, angry again. She was always making things personal, seeing only their relationship to her rather than what was complex about them.
Olivia Sudjic
#46. Suddenly I had to laugh. It was like realising you definitely need to projectile vomit when you thought you had it under control in some imprisoning form of public space.
Olivia Sudjic
#47. To me, it was clear proof of the existence of supersymmetry, the idea that every particle has a partner. She was mine.
Olivia Sudjic
#48. I'm going to have to get an entirely new social scene if I want to avoid him,' she said, hunting for evidence of him amongst her friends' feeds. I made a sympathetic face, but my heart leapt up onto her, beat its fists on her heart, yelled, Me Me Me!
Olivia Sudjic
#49. For a while this seemed to do the trick, and I felt that whatever contamination I had helped to spread, the boundaries I had helped to break, sprinkling flakes of myself all over the surface of New York like so much fish food, had been forgiven.
Olivia Sudjic
#50. It was to do with the glazed look that always comes over me when faced with somebody who has offended or hurt me and yet whose approval I want.
Olivia Sudjic
#51. Or maybe it was already too late; you only get one first love. She was mine, but I had not been hers. She was only going to look for some echo of it, and if I had made the right noises, that echo might have been me for a while.
Olivia Sudjic
#52. I felt the nauseous shiver in my stomach - everything from rage to empathy to morning sickness - that I had grown used to and now thought of as being love.
Olivia Sudjic
#53. My ability to make up lies on the spot chills me as much as it saves me.
Olivia Sudjic
#54. The street had that sad summertime feeling that you want to push on to see why it hurts.
Olivia Sudjic
#55. Maybe, as Mizuko said, we won't even really die, just carry on in the feedback loop we are stuck in. Instead of connecting with new things, widening our worlds, algorithms have shrunk it to a narrow chamber with mirrored walls.
Olivia Sudjic
#56. If everything stays the same, it seems possible for someone to come back.
Olivia Sudjic
#57. I wondered how best to demonstrate that we were kindred spirits.
Olivia Sudjic
#58. I watched us without interest, heard us only faintly, like strangers below my window.
Olivia Sudjic
#59. The sky was always full of birdsong and evening smells, piano music from a window, the stone buildings glowing against the blue, like cream poured over something tart and hot.
Olivia Sudjic
#60. I no longer felt I could try to belong with these people.
Olivia Sudjic
#61. We had, I felt, bared small pieces of our symmetrical souls to each other, fast, as if playing one of those breathless card games, and I had pretended to be as moved as I had been the first time I uncovered it all myself, back in East Hampton.
Olivia Sudjic
#62. He had deduced also that I was quirky and promised me that he was too.
Olivia Sudjic
#63. She told me it was unlucky to share a reading with others, but the main point, the one I don't mind mentioning because it seems relevant to the story, is that she said I had a kind of evil spirit following me. 'Obviously,' she added, 'that sucks. But if we get you some amber -
Olivia Sudjic
#64. She was limp and pathetic and woozy and I loved her, I realised, even more because I knew how completely it was doomed.
Olivia Sudjic
#65. It never ceased to amaze me how she just had the facts always, in her head. It occured to me that if, or when, she died, a whole load of facts, a body of knowledge, might disappear without a trace.
Olivia Sudjic
#66. So there was no explicit bonding. Certainly not the kind you might be expecting if you like films like The Parent Trap as much as Mizuko and I did. We watched it together once, and I dared to say that we were like two little Lindsay Lohans in the isolation cabin, to which she made a kind of grunt.
Olivia Sudjic
#67. They seemed to despise each other, with a kind of loyalty.
Olivia Sudjic
#68. But you'd hope anyone would feel sympathy if they actually saw someone face to face, pleading for a chance.
Olivia Sudjic
#69. I began to cry but maintained my shouting through it, like a wind through sheets of rain.
Olivia Sudjic
#70. The emotional question became why Susy had rejected me. I was interested in that shift, from actively wanting to actively not wanting.
Olivia Sudjic
#71. But I do not know the people I am crying for anymore. I don't let myself sympathise - I think it would be wrong.
Olivia Sudjic
#72. It is 23.32 p.m. I still believe in symmetry, so this will be the last part. You've reached an end if you come back to where you started. I also remain superstitious about certain numbers. I use 23 and 32 for my lottery tickets, for example. It extends to dates. I still see signs.
Olivia Sudjic
#73. I asked to use the bathroom and sat, recovering, on the edge of a marble bath on a dais - the kind Greek husbands are slain in.
Olivia Sudjic
#74. She came back to me at 10.01 the next morning, a mirror time, as I'd expected.
Olivia Sudjic
#75. Roses are like kamikaze love pilots.
Roses are like suicide love bombers.
Olivia Sudjic
#76. I don't want to alarm anyone, but everywhere we go I see Alec Baldwin. It's like he's following us.
Olivia Sudjic
#77. The rejection was bigger than the present moment itself.
Olivia Sudjic
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