Top 100 Mary H.K. Choi Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I have fulfilled all the base layers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and am at the tippy-top. Self-actualization feels incredible. It’s the feeling of being totally ordinary and completely OK with it.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

2. “People don’t really want to know how you’re doing. They want to wait until you’re done telling them so they can tell you how they’re doing.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

3. “Finally, if you’re wondering if it counts and it feels like it counts, it counts.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

4. “You don’t have to feel like you’re overstaying your welcome with me.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

5. “New York is just a place. It’s the people who will become a home for you.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

7. “I don’t know that I know what depression feels like, but most days if I’m honest I wake up with a hammering in my heart and unless I’m talking to Lee I don’t see the point in being conscious.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

9. “Be where your feet are. That’s what my mom says when I’m forecasting – or bugging out about the future. I’m supposed to let an ice cube melt in my hand or flick a rubber band around my wrist so I can, you know, snap out of it, but I don’t do either. I let the circles spin.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

11. “It’s crazy how lonely it is to be in a family.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

12. “There was more than one type of perfectionist. And that I qualified because the kind of perfectionist I was, was the kind that abandoned everything if I wasn’t good enough at it. And that’s why I couldn’t finish tasks.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

13. “Everyone is capable of putting words down or telling a story. But not everyone will actually do it.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

14. “Loving someone was traumatizing. You never knew what would happen to them out there in the world. Everything precious was also vulnerable.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

15. “Everything precious was also vulnerable.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

16. “You’re only as sick as your secrets. The second you talk about it, pfth. She blows a raspberry and waggles her fingers into the air. It all starts to get a little better. Humans need to share their darkest parts. Unburdening makes you closer to everyone.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

17. “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?”

— Mary H.K. Choi

18. “I find that the more I hide, the more presentable I am to the world.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

19. “Art is fuelled by longing but you must learn to want what you have, not get what you want. It’s the only way to stop suffering.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

20. “It’s piles and piles of emotional homework forever if you ever want to qualify as a grown-up.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

21. “This is probably how emergency contacts work. You say something to your person before you go nuts and blow a gasket.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

22. “Life isn’t a destination. It’s the continual practice of things that make you wiser and happier.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

23. “Have you ever considered that it isn’t a place that will improve your life? That there is no such thing as a geographic cure?”

— Mary H.K. Choi

24. “Yeah, exactly where a dad should be. Holding a firearm and warding off potential suitors until that daughter is of consenting age,” he said. “Which in my book is about forty-six.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

25. “Sisters never stand a chance to be friends. We’re pitted against each other from the moment we are born. A daughter is a treasure. Two is a tax.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

26. “I care about everything equally until I care about so many things I get overwhelmed and care about nothing at all.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

27. “At times I can’t even feel myself in my own body.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

28. “Cancer must feel like such a betrayal, knowing that somewhere deep in your body you’re manufacturing tiny bombs that detonate and catch fire.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

29. “It’s not my responsibility to get to the bottom of why my mom’s so unhappy. Nor is it on me to teach my dad how to parent. I love them and I forgive them, but I don’t go to the hardware store looking for orange juice and I don’t expect them to give me things they don’t have. I give myself permission not to spend time with them.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

30. “Being kind is how you get happy.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

31. “It didn’t help that in AP English Lit, junior year, they’d read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” which was basically The Hunger Games except it was written in the forties and had a twist at the end.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

32. “It hurt Penny’s heart how much she loved her. How scared she’d been when Michael called. Loving someone was traumatizing. You never knew what would happen to them out there in the world. Everything precious was also vulnerable.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

33. “I reline my eyes, fix my lipstick, and put away my reflection. I allow a smile to tease at my lips, summoning someone beguiling. I imagine myself in a movie. It usually helps. I glance around for any attractive people. Male, female, old, it doesn’t matter. Someone to see myself through.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

34. “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.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

35. “Loving someone was traumatizing.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

36. “It’s dazzling how disposable we all are.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

37. “We all have the same boring problems. Sometimes the best thing you can do is talk about it.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

38. “Do the next right thing and don’t worry about anything else coming down the pike. You don’t have an audience. No one’s judging you. Do the work.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

40. “Men don’t enjoy the taste of lipstick though they like the look of it.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

41. “But I can’t help but wonder how much my people are mine. If they’d claim me in the same way I want to claim them.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

43. “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.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

44. “Plus, you don’t go to Trader Joe’s unless you’re in it. It’s grocery IKEA. Everybody knows that. You have to be prepared to fight. That’s long relationship territory. Like, we’re talking picking people up from the airport.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

45. “Marriages are the original tiny cult.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

46. “It’s easier to watch myself be sad than actually feel sad.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

47. “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.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

48. “Penny thought of this Korean saying for when you really, really liked something. You’d say it ‘fit your heart exactly.’ Sam fit her heart exactly.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

49. “I know what it’s like to want to leave. How it feels when the home you have is a mirage, an illusion. But I know that wherever I am, if June’s around, I’ll be ok.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

50. “The thought of doing all of this over makes my soul leave my body. I can’t imagine how tiring it’s going to be. But I also love the idea of June’s name looking after both of us.”

— Mary H.K. Choi