Top 100 Mary H.K. Choi Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

53. “Hell really was other people.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

55. “Marriages are the original tiny cult.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

59. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

62. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

68. “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

69. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

71. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

79. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

92. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

94. “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

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

96. “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

97. “In hindsight he was glad it wasn’t the good taco spot because it would have been ruined forever. Anyplace that charged seventy-five cents for condiments could burn in hell. On principle.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

98. “Baby,′ he said. Behind ‘bae’, Penny despised ‘baby’ as a thing for a grown adult woman to be called. It was so prescriptive. Like dressing sexy for Halloween.”

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi

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

— Mary H.K. Choi