Top 100 Mary H.K. Choi Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “You know, the trick to taking care of your sister is letting her think she’s taking care of you.” She scoops my hand in hers. “I suspect you can ask your father the best way to do that since he does it so well with me.” This makes me laugh.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

52. “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

53. “I’m thrilled at the devastation. Destroying beautiful things so carelessly and so fast.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

54. “Families are a trip,” says Lee. “You think you know them so well that you stay wrong about each other.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

55. “Unlike cooking, photography kept you on your toes. It was chaotic and human – utterly unpredictable. to capture an unposed face you had to wait for it. It was spear fishing. you had to move between the competing rhythms of the world and strike.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

56. “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

57. “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.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

59. “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.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

60. “I’m no longer angry. In fact, I’m no longer much of anything.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

62. “Everything about my existence feels like a costume.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

63. “It’s when you really don’t want to ask for help that you might need it the most.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

64. “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.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

65. “It wasn’t a romance; it was too perfect for that. With texts there were only the words and none of the awkwardness. They could get to know each other completely and get comfortable before they had to do anything unnecessarily overwhelming like look at each other’s eyeballs with their eyeballs.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

66. “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

67. “Marriages are the original tiny cult.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

68. “Grow as you build. Autotelism. ‘Auto’ for self and ‘telos’ for goal. Find joy in the learning, Pablo, not in what it will get you. It took me so much searching to stop searching.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

69. “She wondered if the rest of early adulthood would be like this – avoiding roommates, getting ripped off for bad fusion food, and the peculiar loneliness of being smothered by people she didn’t want to spend time with.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

70. “Hell really was other people.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

71. “The last thing I asked you was “You good?” Well, are you? I think about it all the time.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

73. “It wasn’t a romance; it was too perfect for that.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

74. “Instead she’d spend time preparing for her future, living in books until until the exciting part of her life would begin.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

75. “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.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

76. “What you’re calling a hobby could change his life. And if it doesn’t, that has to be okay. You have to forgive him. You’ve got to let people mess up and you’ve still got to help them. You have to talk to them and support them while they make decisions, even if they’re the wrong ones. That’s how people learn, mom. Umma-ni-kah.” Because you’re the mom.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

77. “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.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

78. “People were odd. Sam loved and loathed that about them. Fiction was fine, but real life was the true freak show.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

79. “When I recognize people, it lets me hope that maybe they recognize me, too.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

80. “Humans need to share their darkest parts. Unburdening makes you closer to everyone.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

81. “You know, the trick to taking care of your sister is letting her think she’s taking care of you.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

82. “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.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

83. “I think I get to miss you. I feel like I’ve earned it.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

85. “She laughed. “Are you in love with Penny?” “How is that a conclusion? That’s a question.” Jude rolled her eyes. “She says she’s in love with you.” “She did not.” “Fine, she didn’t say those exact words, but it’s the only explanation. She’s in love with you.” “Stop,” he said. “You know she’s inscrutable. You ever notice how she seems furious when she’s super excited?” Jude laughed. “Or when she’s actually furious and starts bawling? That’s a classic,” she responded.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

86. “People like capable, positive people. It has nothing to do with reality.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

87. “In loving my people, I am a late bloomer and feel horribly prodigal for it.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

88. “Certain parts of San Francisco are what happens when white people have no natural predator.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

89. “Some people’s coping mechanisms were all about festering and secrecy and ruminating until you grew yourself a nice little tumor in your heart with a side of panic attack. Different strokes.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

90. “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.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

91. “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.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

92. “Sam sighed. Maybe if he called she’d tell him where she’d buried his balls and his heart.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

93. “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.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

94. “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.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

95. “I didn’t know that these flashes of information were even thoughts. Until I did. And that they belonged to me. It was my voice talking to my self except I didn’t have to make a sound.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

96. “People aren’t abandoning you just because they go.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

97. “It’s the people who will become a home for you.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

98. “It was inconceivable for Penny that his eyes served any function other than to be admired.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

99. “They both likes pizza way more that their person.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

100. “Penny believed with her whole heart that there were moments – crucial instances – that defined who someone was going to be. There were clues or signs, and you didn’t want to miss them.”

— Mary H.K. Choi