Quotes About Chee

#1. Father Chee?"
"Yes, Amber?"
"Why do some people go through life never knowing a single major tragedy, and then others have horrible things happen to them over and over again?"
"I don't know.

Matthew Quick

#2. I am China, pronounced as Chee-na. And I think it's time the world lets older women age gracefully.

China Machado

#3. A wise coach keeps an open mind and does not make assumptions about people. - Jack Canfield and Peter Chee

Jack Canfield

#4. I remember hearing other models talk about going to castings for Givenchy, and I was like, 'What are they saying?' And then I realized and was like, 'Oh, the Give-in-chee one.' I had been calling it Give-in-chee the whole time. I was shocked.

Jacquelyn Jablonski

#5. I like the way Chee kept God magical, sorta like Santa Claus when you're a kid. More priests should take this approach, because there is a frickin' reason why Santa Claus is more popular than Jesus nowadays.

Matthew Quick

#6. 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

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

Alexander Chee

#8. 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

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

Alexander Chee

#10. 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

#11. 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

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

Alexander Chee

#13. 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

#14. 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

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

Alexander Chee

#16. Once there was, and one day there will be. This is the beginning of every story. "Once

Traci Chee

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

Alexander Chee

#18. 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

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

Alexander Chee

#20. If anything could be a book, there was no telling what you could learn, if you knew what to look for. Smooth river stones spelled out across a mossy floor. Lines drawn in the sand. Or inscribed on the side of a fallen log, half-obscured by twigs and mulch: This is a book.

Traci Chee

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. If you're reading this, then maybe you know you ought to read everything. And maybe you know you ought to read deeply. Because there's witchery in these words and spellwork in the spine.

Traci Chee

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

Alexander Chee

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. She made each suture perfectly - one neat stitch after another - until they were lined up across Archer's wounds like sharp black letters, as if every set of stitches was a healing word Doc had written to keep his skin together. There

Traci Chee

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

Alexander Chee

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. Home's what you make it." Nin shrugged. "Could be a ship. Could be what you carry around on your back day after day. Could be family. Or maybe just one person you love more than any other. That's home." The

Traci Chee

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

Alexander Chee

#39. 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

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

Alexander Chee

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. Were they all just stories whose endings had already been written, the dates of their deaths pinned to the page with periods?

Traci Chee

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

Alexander Chee

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

Alexander Chee

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

Alexander Chee

#47. 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

#48. Captain Reed eyed him thoughtfully. "I built my whole life around the stories they about me. You know what I learned?"

Archer shook his head.

"What you do makes you who you are....

Traci Chee

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. You got a choice, Sef. Control your future, or let your future control you." Above,

Traci Chee

#53. From where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.

Tony Hillerman

#54. ...clutching the Book to his chest, under his crossed arms, as if trying to press it into his ribs, until his lungs filled with letters and his heart became a pulsing paragraph.

Traci Chee

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

Alexander Chee

#56. If you didn't like your own life, you changed it. You ran away. You did something spectacular. you didn't steal someone else's story and pretend it was yours.

Traci Chee

#57. 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

#58. In Kelanna, when they mourn, they tell stories - as if the stories will keep you close to them. Believing that if they tell them often enough, for long enough, you won't be forgotten. Hoping that the stories will keep you alive - if only in memory. But

Traci Chee

#59. 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

#60. In a world where the only evidence of your existence was a body subject to decay and the works you left behind when the body was gone, you tried all manner of things to convince yourself that your life had some meaning, some permanence.

Traci Chee

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. But being smart was overrated. Being stupid and brave and curious? Now that's something stories are made of. Dimarion's

Traci Chee

#65. 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

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

Alexander Chee

#67. 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

#68. 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

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

Alexander Chee

#70. 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

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

Alexander Chee