Top 100 Mary H.K. Choi Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “He couldn’t believe Jude’s mute, macabre roommate had saved his life. He wondered if he’d have to get her a small taxidermied spider or something for her efforts.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

52. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

54. “I swat his arm. I want to tell him that the greaseball fat kid he knew back then is dead. That I’m exciting now. Desirable. That admirable people have made all sorts of terrible decisions with me.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

57. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

59. “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

60. “What’s the point? The planet is on fire and everything is random.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

62. “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

63. “Hell really was other people.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

64. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

69. “It’s demoralizing when wins have nothing to do with talent.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

70. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

73. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

75. “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

76. “He holds me longer than I’d expected him to. I leech everything I can out of the hug. Bleed it.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

78. “As cool as glaucoma and lung cancer. Penny had never had a cigarette in her life, and if they did smoke together Penny would probably have a coughing fit that lasted forever and ended on an audible fart.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

79. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

81. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

83. “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

84. “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.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

85. “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

86. “I want a world where everything lights up because I’m in it.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

87. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

99. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi