Quotes from Alexander Chee

as lover's complaint was noted, perhaps, by the one who knew to find it, and for the rest of the room, only artistic caprice—the

In some way I had never known how to express, I'd feared I would have to become the first of my kind, whatever my kind was, should I be allowed to survive—that which history has never seen before.

A world he'd waited for to be born came into being with my return to him, and I was now the source of it. I

The strange amber twilight I'd lived with was gone, and in its place was some terrible new brightness. I'd gone from feeling lost in a dream to lost in wakefulness, as if I might never sleep again.

The life I led now I'd made so I would never be her again. I'd never wanted to be reminded of her and her struggles again. And yet I knew I had always been her; I still was her. I

Poison, in my experience, is always hidden; it seems to me we never know its color.

I became something they couldn't imagine, something they would have kept me from becoming, and that, it seems to me, was always in my nature to become. They

I was spelling out a message that would allow me to talk to myself and to others. The novel that emerged was about things I could not speak of in life, in some cases literally. I would lie, or I would feel a weight on my chest as if someone was sitting there. But when the novel was done, I could read from it. A prosthetic voice.

A collection like a circus of daredevils, but with the determined charm of a Chinese drag queen making her home in Iowa. Siasoco takes us on a trip through the world we know by way of characters I've not seen in fiction before, or at least, not enough of--characters with stories I have been waiting for. A bravura debut.

It's the shadow on every kiss and every dollar, that it might not be there tomorrow.

I tilt my head back and carefully toss my hair over my right shoulder in the way I have seen my younger sister do. I realize I know one more thing about her than I did before - what it feels like to do this and why you would. It's like your own little thunderclap.

They had the faces of angels and the determination of demons.

The word for her in Paris, a courtesan who had made it to the stage, was grue—it happened so often there was a word for it.

I was now both the secret and the keeper of it, but the idea that I could not know what is was I served, nor why, nor who, became nearly unendurable all at once

I cleared my throat and found my voice then, like a coin suddenly in your pocket that'd been missing when last you looked for it. Ernesto's

I was now both the secret and the keeper of it, but the idea that I could not know what it was I served, nor why, nor who, became nearly unendurable all at once

He had said this to me before, and as I heard it, I felt as if I were vanishing into all the other times he had said this to me, returning to a single place where I was always leaving him, and on my return, he was always saying something of this kind.

It's nothin' to me, he said. We're none of us made right for this world. But we're still here, aren't we? And

Paul Lisicky, in his new memoir, 'The Narrow Door,' describes losing his old friend, the novelist Denise Gess, and his husband, the acclaimed poet and memoirist Mark Doty, within a year of each other: Gess to cancer, at the age of 57, and Doty to another man.

The beauty of Maine is such that you can't really see it clearly while you live there. But now that I've moved away, with each return it all becomes almost hallucinatory: the dark blue water, the rocky coast with occasional flashes of white sand, the jasper stone beaches along the coast, the pine and fir forests somehow vivid in their stillness.

A woman's desire is either terrifying, or it's ignored.

PhD, MFA, self-taught - the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.

Acadia was founded in 1916 by Woodrow Wilson as the first Eastern national park, aided by rich men, often with middle initials, the 'rusticators,' as they were known then, the first of our wealthy out-of-state visitors.

I knew I wanted the parties in 'The Queen of the Night' to be convincing, beautiful, and also dramatic: situations where significant things happened on a scale that was both grand and intimate. There were several texts that helped me think about how to do this, and one of the most important ones was Charlotte Bronte's novel 'Villette.'