Olivia Sudjic Quotes

The sensation that had plagued me after graduating, of being on the outside of some mystery, peeking in, returned. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Yeah!' I said again, widening my eyes and nodding slowly but emphatically to show that she had seen into my own symmetrical soul. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Email is the scourge of our age,' said Silvia. 'Email and cancer. ~ Olivia Sudjic

I had shelved expectations of another kiss; the intensity of not kissing now worked almost as well - the proximity and denial. ~ Olivia Sudjic

She was limp and pathetic and woozy and I loved her, I realised, even more because I knew how completely it was doomed. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Yes, I think he even has a title. He's like son and heir.'

I turned her words over in my mind as I pretended to play with my phone.

Sun and hair
Son and heir
Sun and air ~ Olivia Sudjic

I became convinced that I was being watched.

Because self was still leaking everywhere, a part of me began to think it was Mizuko rather than a stranger. I hoped that there might still be a reunion. I hoped it in the shy, sly way hope comes out of the jar, the mistranslated box, last - after everything and everyone else has escaped. ~ Olivia Sudjic

She hasn't forgotten that I once called that thing she does, with the pins, Pinteresque. ~ Olivia Sudjic

The city is tricky. The highs are so much higher, but in the lows you drop straight down again to bedrock. It helps that streets are snapped to a grid. There are also psychic boutiques and sidewalk prophets, but until you contrive your own love story set in that city, even one as warped as mine, you remain outside it, looking for signals in the white smoke that rises from under, in the sudden hot laundry smells and the LED typos of street vendors donuteasily becomes dount, ominously like don't, to my mind. There was a DOUNT sign on Second Avenue which more than once redirected my superstitious footsteps. ~ Olivia Sudjic

We had, I felt, bared small pieces of our symmetrical souls to each other, fast, as if playing one of those breathless card games, and I had pretended to be as moved as I had been the first time I uncovered it all myself, back in East Hampton. ~ Olivia Sudjic

He told me things about himself that should have made him sound urbane but did the opposite. He told me, for example, that he liked Steve Reich's music, modern-art museums, and Beat poetry. These words flew out of his mouth and went boomeranging back as if they knew they weren't meant to take the conversation anywhere but back to him. He also explained that he really liked interacting with different kinds of people. When I didn't immediately respond to this, he repeated it, and so I assured him I believed it. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Begin at the beginning. Know nothing. Tabula rasa. At the same time, part of me wanted to distinguish myself. To let her sense the bond we shared straightaway. Maybe subtly hint at some of my secret intelligence. A secret handshake. A nod. I now completely understood how criminal masterminds could so easily get caught before the big reveal - the temptation to boast about the execution was huge. ~ Olivia Sudjic

When I read it now it's like I have broken into a reality that is not mine, and when I step out of it, as if I had removed my headphones and heard the city again, it is easy to close the door behind me. ~ Olivia Sudjic

She told me it was unlucky to share a reading with others, but the main point, the one I don't mind mentioning because it seems relevant to the story, is that she said I had a kind of evil spirit following me. 'Obviously,' she added, 'that sucks. But if we get you some amber - ~ Olivia Sudjic

I saw her note the way I hovered over the various ethnicities on the form. First the 'white' box, then to the airspace over the 'black' box, a kind of momentary hesitation, a protest of stillness, a staring into the abyss of everything I did not know about myself. She, like me, was made of halves. ~ Olivia Sudjic

When she did walk, to the bathroom between the chairs and the customers leaning back in them, oblivious to her manoeuvres, the sight felt strangely moving and profound, like a baby, or a veteran getting out of a wheelchair, or a deer in snow. That is perhaps overdoing it. Maybe I didn't quite know that at the time, but it was striking. If you have not seen a deer in snow, I mean: moving with precision, but as if she might leap away in a completely different direction at any moment. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Since I've moved here a Chinese takeaway on the main street has ominiously renamed itself from whatever it was before to the Golden Bowl, but other than that, the landscape is the last place on earth that might call Mizuko to mind. ~ Olivia Sudjic

The messages must be stuck somewhere in the tube of light underneath the ocean that connects London and New York. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Maybe, as Mizuko said, we won't even really die, just carry on in the feedback loop we are stuck in. Instead of connecting with new things, widening our worlds, algorithms have shrunk it to a narrow chamber with mirrored walls. ~ Olivia Sudjic

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. ~ Olivia Sudjic

I know I only want him,' she said between sobs, the syllables all wrong, 'because he doesn't want me. How is that even possible?'

'It's normal to want what we can't have,' I said soothingly.

'No, I mean how can he not want me? ~ Olivia Sudjic

I watched us without interest, heard us only faintly, like strangers below my window. ~ Olivia Sudjic

From watching Silvia, I'd learned that one of the worst things about being ill is that most people find your suffering opaque. With this sadness it was different. I felt that I needed to nurture and protect it from people's understanding. I wanted Susy's sympathy because I wanted comfort and to feel less alone, and yet I also didn't want it - I didn't want my personal grief to be part of something universal right then. ~ Olivia Sudjic

I had one of those flashes - the sea-glass feel of a well-worn phrase. ~ Olivia Sudjic

The sky was always full of birdsong and evening smells, piano music from a window, the stone buildings glowing against the blue, like cream poured over something tart and hot. ~ Olivia Sudjic

The situation got worse when they came back to her apartment after and someone put on music. An advert interrupted during a moment when I was the person nearest the laptop, and so somebody said to me - quite threateningly, I felt - Put something else on. Obviously I forgot every song I have ever heard in my entire life. In one swift tug, like the tablecloth trick where everything is supposed to remain on the table gone wrong, every name of every artist disappeared too. The only keywords I could think of were the ones on a toy keyboard-and-tape-recorder combo I'd been given as a child, and I hadn't known their meaning even then. Bossa nova, for example.

I said I couldn't think of anything, any music, except silence, and retreated to the corner of the room, pretending to busy myself by scouring the bookcase there, which held little gatherings of figurines as well as Mizuko's many books. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Well, then, what's the plan now? You can't stay here forever.'

My plan was indeed to stay there forever. ~ Olivia Sudjic

It never ceased to amaze me how she just had the facts always, in her head. It occured to me that if, or when, she died, a whole load of facts, a body of knowledge, might disappear without a trace. ~ Olivia Sudjic

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. ~ Olivia Sudjic

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

But it is difficult to tell whether something is an oppurtunity or a trap when you are put on the spot. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Waking in the morning, I had to remember grief all over again. It was sunny, a white winter sun, and that made me sad. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Was this what the city would look like when knowledge was no longer enough? When the desire to turn inward, surrendering entirely to one's own private world of nonresistance, overwhelmed, like creeping ivy, our desire to know worlds beyond it? ~ Olivia Sudjic

The glow of the steetlamps sat heavy and thick above me. As I walked aimlessly, in the direction of downtown, I returned to my theories. That Mizuko and I shared the pictorial equivalent of DNA. That a sympathetic magic existed between us, no matter how far apart we were pulled. That we defied physical laws of time and space, waves, gravity, the rules laid down by physicists which governed our physical universe (earthquakes, tsunamis) and physical bodies. And yet somehow our connection had led to the opposite of intimacy. My search had led to its opposite. I had never felt so isolated and disconnected, even from myself. ~ Olivia Sudjic

No order, no pattern, just chaos. Lots of little universes separated by invisible screens . . . ~ Olivia Sudjic

I began to cry but maintained my shouting through it, like a wind through sheets of rain. ~ Olivia Sudjic

And yet how treacherous, I thought, after such neutrality, bordering on indifference, and occaisonally open hostility, when the whole city finally seemed alive and tremulous to my touch, a seething structure reaching out to meet me and accommodate my every move, as if I had been expected and was welcome there, that she was the only thing in it that would not respond. ~ Olivia Sudjic

I sank back, deeper into the parallel universe I had found. ~ Olivia Sudjic

I don't want to alarm anyone, but everywhere we go I see Alec Baldwin. It's like he's following us. ~ Olivia Sudjic

At first, sending the confession by real mail had felt like a genius device. I would not have to sit by my phone and watch for the signs that indicated it had been sent and seen. Slim but solid paper would, I hoped, convey me better. Now I had to consider the very real frailties of the system. Ludicrous, in fact, to entrust something of such magnitude to a mailman. A perfect stranger. I looked up stories of nefarious New York mailmen. There was one who has willfully upturned the lives of ordinary people like myself by hoarding 40,000 pieces of undelivered mail. The city was crawling with thieves and malcontents. ~ Olivia Sudjic

I wondered how best to demonstrate that we were kindred spirits. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Things which had at first felt like signs, if I analysed them for too long, ended up feeling like the movements of my own reflection in dark glass. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Instantly I remembered everything I hated about him. But it was, in a way, comforting to know that he had not changed at all. ~ Olivia Sudjic

I saw a doctor. I went in case there were any remnants of the summer inside me - sticky, slender fish bones that needed to be scraped into the bin. He was dismissive of my concerns and said my body would have let me know by now. Did I have what was known as female intuition? I said I'd had my feminine intuition somewhat scrambled in the past. ~ Olivia Sudjic

The street had that sad summertime feeling that you want to push on to see why it hurts. ~ Olivia Sudjic

The sharp, superficial pain at being spoken to unkindly had obscured the deeper pain, which had not yet turned into something hard and heavy. ~ Olivia Sudjic

I hope when this is done I'll be able to get back into my happy gardening vibe that was so healthy for me. I want to go back to my routine and my morning ritual with the compost, but it will probably be that my life will split in two. New Leaf Gardening in Wood Green will be happening in parallel to a fantasy that runs along the bottom of that screen like a ticker. Alice will be fine. Rabbit will stay up tonight, and every night. Resending and resending, reopening the page to see if she has responded, if anyone has. The spinning wheel will make my eyes hurt and everything else will go dark. ~ Olivia Sudjic

I asked to use the bathroom and sat, recovering, on the edge of a marble bath on a dais - the kind Greek husbands are slain in. ~ Olivia Sudjic

The rejection was bigger than the present moment itself. ~ Olivia Sudjic

For a while this seemed to do the trick, and I felt that whatever contamination I had helped to spread, the boundaries I had helped to break, sprinkling flakes of myself all over the surface of New York like so much fish food, had been forgiven. ~ Olivia Sudjic

I couldn't think of a reply except No, so I said, 'Sure. ~ Olivia Sudjic

I was on the sidewalk, buffering, wondering if it was okay to follow people in real life. ~ Olivia Sudjic

When he wasn't making quirky jokes about his mother like this - it happened more than once - he mainly spoke at me, about his job and about his band, Jettisoned Airplane, an electronic music duo, which had been formed in March, inspired by the plane that had gone missing and not yet been found. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Or maybe it was already too late; you only get one first love. She was mine, but I had not been hers. She was only going to look for some echo of it, and if I had made the right noises, that echo might have been me for a while. ~ Olivia Sudjic

That night I dreamt about the roses laid at the wrong feet - the feet of the nurse. Each bit of the dream was like a hyperlink. I pressed on one, wanting answers, and it took me to another. I could never get to the meaning at the bottom of any of the bits. When I reached for the petals of the roses, I was touching a metal seatbelt buckle in a coach, driving by night through a remote place, with a band of mist running parallel to the glass I leant against. ~ Olivia Sudjic

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. ~ Olivia Sudjic

A neon-pink 3 flickered and instantly disappeared again into the dark. The sight of it on my own device now made me sick. I held my finger down on the menu screen; each little app logo began to vibrate. I deleted the 3. I contemplated deleting everything. Cleaning it all away. The idea had a charm, a self-cancellation, many little suicides, a way to dispatch myself without actually going anywhere. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Have you ever truly, keenly felt like you don't know who you are? Do you ever do something and think, Who is at the controls? Like some mad pilot has locked you out of the cockpit? I definitely do. I feel a kind of vertigo that makes me shake afterwards. I guess we all feel it when making a difficult-seeming choice, and sometimes you seriously don't know what you want because you don't know who you're supposed to be, or who you want to be. Physics, my first and second families, my philosophy degree, had all failed to help me answer that question. The former has led me to wonder whether I am one of an infinite number of Alices in multiple universes. A quantum fuck-up, which is someone who fucks up in every one of those universes but in different ways. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Mizuko wonders if the GPS is still monitoring their progress. She has the distinct feeling of being watched by something in the darkness. This makes watching the footage and reading the story at the same time a strange experience, as if she can sense me, a menace from the future, following them along the dark road. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Mizuko loved reading the dictionary. She liked it when there were multiple meanings for words and when opposite meanings could be contained. ~ Olivia Sudjic

I felt my own self-sufficiency, my own Walden Pond, seeping out of me as if I'd sprung a leak. Self soaked into everything around me - the floor, the walls, the one window, the grass. The words on the page. ~ Olivia Sudjic

But I can't help thinking of the shock I felt when I finally realised it was winter, on exiting Mizuko's apartment. The summer was long gone, but I hadn't noticed until then. ~ Olivia Sudjic

When I have really blonde hair, I usually go for a more natural look, wearing way less makeup. ~ Olivia Wilde

I'm so happy with 'Grease' and 'Xanadu,' particularly because of the music in both films. ~ Olivia Newton-John

As long as you believe in yourself and your own vision, you have something. When you give up that, you are personally bankrupt. ~ Olivia Goldsmith

I love all Helmut Lang. I love Alexander Wang and Alice+Olivia. ~ Addison Timlin

He made a small movement of his head. "Do you love Pennhyll as well as you do the mountain upon which it sits?"
"I find it much like you."
His mouth quirked, and then, curved in another smile. She stared, transfixed by the sight. "Unpleasant and forlorn?"
She tipped her head to one side, considering him. She felt an odd sensation of understanding this harsh man who was, in fact, a stranger to her. "Not entirely unpleasant, that I will admit. Nor forlorn, either."
"Do not tell me you find me amiable."
"Certainly not. Like Pennhyll, you are strong and fierce." She felt, ridiculous as it was, that she knew him better than she knew herself. "To make a life here is to have courage and heart, and those you surely have. ~ Carolyn Jewel

It's easy to think you love someone when the person you really want isn't there for you, at least not physically ~ Morgan Parker

When I was a young girl, I was so crazy about animals that I wanted to do something associated with them, and I thought of being a vet. But then again, I figured I had to go to medical school, and science wasn't a good subject for me, so I dropped the idea pretty soon and thought maybe I could be a vet's assistant. ~ Olivia Newton-John

cross my mind," Marshall replies with a tone, still cold toward him. Mom tries to salvage the mood. "I think it's wonderful! You make a charming couple. I wish you both the best." My dad gives her a side-glance, which she ignores. Olivia stands there, an angry expression on her usually pretty face. She's glaring at me with such rage and gives Hunt a confused, wounded ~ Lena Black

Now you're just being silly. He's a mercenary- he's not going to go about penning love letters, and really, what would he write? 'Anna ... love you ... grrr?' Olivia to Annalia ~ Kresley Cole

Olivia Proudie, however, was a girl of spirit: she had the blood of two peers in her veins, and better still she had another lover on her books, so Mr. Slope sighed in vain, and the pair soon found it convenient to establish a mutual bond of inveterate hatred. ~ Anthony Trollope

ELIZABETH SIROIS WHARTON, 87, passed away peacefully on May 29, 2010, at Warsaw County Memorial Hospital. She was born on January 19, 1923, the son of Marcel and Catherine Sirois. She is survived by her brother, Henry Sirois, her sister, Charlotte Gibney, her niece, Holly Gibney, and her daughter, Janelle Patterson. Elizabeth was predeceased by her husband, Alvin Wharton, and her beloved daughter, Olivia. Private visitation will be held from 10 AM to 1 PM at Soames Funeral Home ~ Stephen King

It's so beautiful and red."
Pippa nodded. "That's the chromium."
"The what?"
"Chromium. It is an additive in the crystal that turns it red. If it were anything else added... it wouldn't be a ruby. It would be a sapphire." Olivia blinked, and Pippa continued, "It's a common misconception that all sapphires are blue, but that's not the case. They can be any color... green or yellow or pink, even. It depends on the additive. But they're all called sapphires. It's only if they're red that they're called something else. Rubies. Because of the chromium. ~ Sarah MacLean

You could knock," Trey said. Brian paused in the bedroom's doorway holding his towel around his waist. Standing before the long dresser, Trey wrapped his arms around the thin young man in front of him and plastered his body to the guy's back. Trey's hand slid up under the hem of his new friend's T-shirt. The guy's eyes widened and he caught Trey's hands in his. "H-hey, Master Sinclair, erm, Brian. Can I call you Brian?" Brian shrugged and the guy flushed. "This isn't what it looks like. I don't like guys or anything." He shook his head vigorously. "You will," Trey murmured, inching the guy's shirt further up his belly. "Trey, are you molesting virgins again?" Brian grinned at his best friend's delight with his latest conquest. ~ Olivia Cunning

I still audition a lot and work really hard to get work. So I don't really walk around feeling like I've made it. My short term goals are really just to be creatively stimulated and to be excited about material I might be working on. ~ Olivia Thirlby

I dropped my bag to the floor and the sound echoed throughout the house. No one shouted, "who's home?" or "Cassie? Is that you?". Instead the house gobbled up the sound as if it didn't know when the next taste of noise would come. Then again, the house hadn't experienced Olivia yet. ~ Mindy Ruiz

Settled on the carriage seat, Olivia drew in a deep breath, the first in what felt like five years. she knew it was wrong, what she was feeling. Because of widow of only a week shouldn't wish to dance a jig. But God help her, that's precisely what part of her wanted to do. Not on the grave of her recently deceased husband, of course-that would be considered rude. Just off to the side would suffice. ~ Tamera Alexander

When the plague struck Chicago, the townspeople here erected the gargoyles, and nary a soul was lost to the Black Death."
"The bubonic plague predates Chicago by about five hundred years."
He lowered himself to the bench. "I know. I was very disappointed when I found out. Almost as bad as when I learned there were no fairies. The world is much more interesting with goblins and plagues."
"Unless you catch the plague. ~ Kelley Armstrong

It's really hard to get stories made that are about women. Not just women being obsessed with men, or supporting men. And it's really hard to get men to be a part of films that are about women in a leading role. I'm really interested in how we can adjust that. ~ Olivia Wilde

The men re-tighten my bolts just for safe measure.
The men open my car door, Ladies first.
The men are always helping.

One man asks how I reach the pedals.
One man asks where my daddy is.
One man opens his trunk and says,
Bet you're small enough to fit. ~ Olivia Gatwood

I feel like the luckiest person on the planet. 'Tron' was such a departure for me. ~ Olivia Wilde

Peter, when you feel like this, i just want you to include me. It's fine that you come here, just tell me. I wanna understand what you're going through and I need you to understand what i'm going through. ~ Olivia Dunham

I am a big music nerd. ~ Olivia Wilde

I took you to an intimate restaurant, then to a suggestive movie. There's nothing left to talk about, unless it's horizontally. ~ Olivia Newton-John

Olivia, if you need anything give me a call. I'm never far. N. ~ M. Leighton

I'll always want you, Olivia. It was never about not wanting you, it was about wanting you too much and you not wanting me back! ~ Tarryn Fisher

Family holidays and weekends are really brightly colored memories, full of my mother and father, rather than our nannies and au pairs. ~ Olivia Williams

Working with Disney is really and truly like working with a family. Everyone is so supportive and so wonderful. I've worked with Disney since I was twelve, and they've given me so many opportunities that I'll forever be grateful for. ~ Olivia Holt

She's elegant," Olivia stated. "I would kill to have her figure."
"Really?"
"Of course. I have always wished to look precisely like her. Though obviously, not enough to avoid food," she added.
"That's madness. You have everything she doesn't."
Olivia opened her mouth, ready to argue.
"Everything she hasn't."
She frowned at him.
"Including me. ~ Eloisa James

All of us sat at the kitchen table and dug in. Someone thanked Laadan for the meal and Deacon about had a coronary.

"Who tenderized the meat? Who marinated and watched it dutifully?" His blond brows lowered as he held his fork like Luke held a dagger. "That would be me"

Laadan nodded. "I peeled potatoes. That was about it."

"I didn't know you could cook," I said, surprised.

Freshly showered, Aiden dropped into the seat beside his brother. His dark hair was damp and swept back, revealing his broad cheekbones. He clapped his brother on the shoulder. "Deacon is one hell of a cook."

"Hmm." Olivia grinned as she chased a scalloped potato across her plate. "Learn something new every day, right? ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

I kind of took inspiration from my time in Paris. That was kind of the real time when I discovered European fashion. It's stuck with me since University. ~ Olivia Palermo

We are all women you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these – 'Chloe liked Olivia …' Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women. 'Chloe liked Olivia,' I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely Antony and Cleopatra would have been altered had she done so! As it is, I thought, letting my mind, I am afraid, wander a little from Life's Adventure, the whole thing is simplified, conventionalized, if one dared say it, absurdly. Cleopatra's only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am? How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. There is an attempt at it in Diana of the Crossways. They are confidantes, of course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. ~ Virginia Woolf

If there were a Jessica Chase instruction manual, it would be written backwards in Arabic Pig Latin and twelve thousand pages long with random pages missing. ~ Olivia Cunning

It burned, but it was beautiful. ~ Olivia Fuller

I wish I could print up a sign and tape it on my forehead. I OFFICIALLY DO NOT WANT TO KISS ETHAN WATE. NOW PLEASE LET ME BE FRIENDS WITH HIM. ~ Kami Garcia

I'm a real girly-girl. ~ Olivia Culpo

If you think that your child is going to be really sensitive to the fact that they might not win - which they probably won't - you shouldn't do it because it's not healthy if they get the feeling that they're not good enough or they're not worthy. ~ Olivia Culpo

Failing to prepare is preparing to fail. ~ Olivia Jake

I'm all for typewriters, with instant carbon copies, and seeing films in cinemas. ~ Olivia De Havilland