146 Quotes by Alexander Chee

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

You are never lost in sorrow, it seems to me, ever. You do know the way. In fact, you don’t think there’s 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 d’Enfer – underneath this life, but never really apart from it.

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.

The music we are singing has been sung by hundreds of years by boys. I wonder if God expects to hear it rising off the Earth, like the bloom of a perennial flower. Or if it is a standing challenge, for us to come together and sing for him. Eric tells us in the old days of the castrati, elite Italian choristers who gelded themselves to keep their high clear voices. Some boys hold their crotches when that story is told, but I understand. I could want it that badly, to keep a voice.

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.

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.

There’s a reason that whenever fascists come to power, the writers are among the first to go to jail.

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.

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.