Mary H.K. Choi Quotes

Fiction was fine, but real life was the true freak show.

You can be with the same person for a long time and have it be fine and meet someone else who instantly makes you see that it's broken

They both likes pizza way more that their person.

Penny Googled "imposter syndrome."

Informally used to describe people who are unable to internalize their accomplishments despite external evidence of their competence.

it's more this undeniable mood. It's this warm, familiar and exciting feeling where you miss them already when you're with them.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we told each other the things we never say.

It means I'll think about you all the time and wish you were close even when I'm not here.

The next morning Sam woke up feeling good. Not sensational or anything foolish but supremely okay.

To be a hero, you had to decide it was you.

There was no way she'd allow him to see her do 97 percent of her normal activities. She was a monster. A monster who was flat as a board with no ass. In fact, the only thing she had going on in the curves department was an enormous cystic pimple on her chin that hurt when she touched it. Yeah, no.

Penny would stop trying. Instead she'd spend time preparing for her future, living in books until the exciting part of her life would begin. Things would matter then. In fact, everything would be different.

Create diverse characters because you can. Especially ones that aren't easy to write. A character that scares you is worth exploring. Yet if you breathe life into a character and it comes to you too easily - say you're writing from the viewpoint of a black man in America and you're not one? Think hard about where your inspiration is coming from.

If you're going to be racist you should at least try to be less ignorant, although maybe that was a contradiction . . .

I want out of this store, out of this moment, out of my skin. I need an elastic band to snap around my wrist. I rub my eyes until I see stars. I rub them again as if I can scrape the horrible, weak-willed pipe dreams from my brain.

In hindsight he was glad it wasn't the good taco spot because it would have been ruined forever. Anyplace that charged seventy-five cents for condiments could burn in hell. On principle.

When Penny left a banana on her desk as an offering, Jude rejected it. She refused it by putting it on Penny's work chair, so when Penny went to write, she sat on it. As tiny passive-aggressive revenges went, it was adorable, and it killed Penny that they couldn't laugh about it.

Everything precious was also vulnerable.

Life isn't a destination. It's the continual practice of things that make you wiser and happier.

Penny arranged everything exactly the way that made sense. TP was hung in the correct direction ('over' obviously; 'under' was for murderers).

You've got to understand that not everybody's going to be exactly your kind of person. They're not going to be completely satisfactory or meet your myriad qualifications.

She wished she could explore his body and inspect him. Learn him and memorize him. That way she'd know what to miss when he was gone. Sam was heartbreakingly, hauntingly beautiful. It made her heart hurt. This couldn't end well.

You're way too hard on yourself. This analysis and thinking and plotting and figuring out, it's stopping you from living your life,

And for all the people waiting for permission to level up enough before they start working on something big and scary--just go in. Don't be like me.

Finally, if you're wondering if it counts and it feels like it counts, it counts.

At least now she had time to write. All the time. In the world. Alone. Forever.

Trying to get better at the thing you want to be the best at is humiliating.

Sam wanted to get up, calmly set his napkin down, and sprint out into the night.

I like knowing that you exist. It doesn't make me feel any less lonely, because life is lonely, but it makes me feel a lot less alone.

It's piles and piles of emotional homework forever if you ever want to qualify as a grown-up

But sometimes it's so incidental that these people are the parents. Beyond the biology of it. It's not as if they had to pass a test or unlock achievements to be the ones making the decisions. Sometimes they're actually stupid.

Plenty of people craved attention. It had to be the right person, someone who naturally commanded it. Sam suspected most outwardly noisy people were boring in the inside. No more than the textbook swirl of insecurities and narcissism.

Nothing that is a manifestation of your creative energies is stupid... Doing nothing is the only stupid.

They both liked pizza way more than their person.

It's lonely when no one worries about you. Not even your parents. You start to wonder what's wrong with you.

want to live someplace that

There was no way Penny would go to House and let Sam see her. That would ruin everything. Sam would take one look at her and be like, "Yikes, never mind.

At least there was coffee. Reliable, delicious, life-giving coffee.

Let's just say when I was little and my mom was out, I'd go to bed with a ketchup bottle."

"I already love this story so much..."

"It was a foolproof plan. If the bad guys came in I could douse myself and they wouldn't kill me because I was already dead."

"Jesus, I can't tell if that's the cutest thing I've ever heard or the absolute most sad.

Loving someone was traumatizing.

Dude. Every mom is the most annoying human in the universe, but most of them, besides the super-abusive genuinely bad ones, are in your corner.

I want to be with someone I can talk to. I want to be with someone who automatically has a fat folder on me. Someone who feels lucky when I tell them the most unflattering, scary stuff.

Here's what I want to know about school. Everyone assumes kids are bad at decisions, right? So why would anyone let an eighteen-year-old kid pick what they want to do in college?

Sam sighed. Maybe if he called she'd tell him where she'd buried his balls and his heart.

People scared Penny all the time. Like her mother and even Sam. It meant she loved them.