146 Quotes by Alexander Chee

It was such a hard thing, this virtue, it seemed to me. Keeping it was like having to grip the knife by the blade and defend yourself with the hilt. 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. I was sure, as I was led away, I would be better off without it. It was better to be done with it and be gone.

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.

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.

Did you ever see a bee lying drunk on a rose? Lost in the petal, so close you can’t see its tiny burrowing. In this way, I hang as I can. As close as I can.

Sometimes, I think I know what my grandparents were listening for. Sound waves don’t ever go away. Not one sound goes away. The wave simply expands, infinitely. The sound remains. Imagine a cosine arc the size of Jupiter, and that might be the size of the wave of the last thing Peter ever said. I’d need an ear the size of another solar system to hear him again.

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

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

But inside the self performing as someone who was fine was the self who was not, and the vision I’d had of my life, the one that had me wanting to scream, was a vision of how living this way, inside of this performance, had blighted my life. I felt like a tree struck by lightning a long time ago, burning secretly from the inside out, the bark still smooth to the end – the word FINE painted on it.

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.