Quotes by Alexander Chee

You ought to know, you were my best friend. You were. I know you loved me. I loved you.No one should have gone through what we went through, but we did. And it kills me to think of it.But I didnt love you like you loved me. I dont hate you for that. It just makes me sorry, that there isnt someone else who could love you better.I know when you think about how I went, youll get it. I was always uneasy about being alive. The idea of being dead makes me feel clear. When I think of it. It makes me think peace, peace, peace. It makes me happy. I am looking forward to it, to the absence of everything. And so I want you to be happy for me, that this is better for me. That I found what I needed. I know you wont be. But its the last thing I want. You happy.

The secret to being a rider in the hippodrome wasnt just that you must be agile, or that you must be good with horses, or that you must be strong and steady as the horse careens to the far end of the arena and back with you riding on its back. It was that you must hide inside your costume a little of a killers heart.The animal will be tender with you, and you with it, but the animal never forgets that when what it wants for survival requires your death, it will become unafraid to kill you. And so you cannot forget this, either.It is, on reflection, good training to be a courtesan. A woman of any kind.

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

Sappho isnt really meant to be read. Its meant to be sung and there were dances for the songs, also. Sappho was a performance artist, and now she exists as a textual project. She was saved by her critics, and by people who wrote of her in letters to each other. As the morning sun lathers the pool through the long windows and stripes the opposite walls in gold, I look at the fragment translations. Shes paper, too. A paper poet for a paper boy. People claim to be translating her but they dont, really, they use her to write poems from as they fill in the gaps in the fragments. A duet. She may have meant for these to be solos but theyre duets now, though the second singer blends in with the first. The first singer in this case is offstage, like in the old days of stars who couldnt sing, a real singer hidden behind a curtain, which is the velvet drape of history.

You are never lost in sorrow, it seems to me, ever. You do know the way. In fact, you dont think theres any other. Sorrow seemed to me to be more like a road would through life, through the days of your life, like the old Roman ruins near the Tuileries or the rue dEnfer -- underneath this life, but never really apart from it.

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.

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.

After his sisters were taken away, the Japanese occupying force sent my grandfather to Imperial Schools. My first language is Japanese, he tells me. English far away. Sometimes, right after he told me, I would look at him and wonder what it felt like, to have the print of your enemy all the way inside you, right into the way you shaped your thoughts.

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.

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.

Lilliet Berne, La Generale, newly returned to Paris after a year spent away, the Falcon soprano whose voice was so delicate it was rumored she endangered it even by speaking, her silences as famous as her performances.

My fascination with womens clothes began very early. My mother was a very fashionable woman. She also made her own clothes. She had these fashion magazines, and I would draw the women in them. My middle school art teacher suggested that I have a fashion drawing show.

Liz Benedict, a teacher of mine at Iowa, is the person who introduced me to James Salters work.

The beauty of Maine is such that you cant really see it clearly while you live there. But now that Ive moved away, with each return it all becomes almost hallucinatory: the dark blue water, the rocky coast with occasional flashes of white sand, the jasper stone beaches along the coast, the pine and fir forests somehow vivid in their stillness.