89 Quotes by Olivia Sudjic

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.

It continues to impress me how fluently Americans, even immigrants like her, speak of their achievements.

I found it hard to write the bits where the things that were at first surprising or even shocking became normal incrementally until I couldn't see that they were anything but normal, because everything else had shifted just one centimetre here and one centimetre there, moving at the speed fingernails grow, until finally everything just clicked into exactly the wrong place.

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.

My ability to make up lies on the spot chills me as much as it saves me.

The rejection was bigger than the present moment itself.

The emotional question became why Susy had rejected me. I was interested in that shift, from actively wanting to actively not wanting.

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.

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.