Top 40 Olivia Sudjic Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “She was limp and pathetic and woozy and I loved her, I realised, even more because I knew how completely it was doomed.”

— Olivia Sudjic

2. “Or maybe it was already too late; you only get one first love. She was mine, but I had not been hers. She was only going to look for some echo of it, and if I had made the right noises, that echo might have been me for a while.”

— Olivia Sudjic

3. “I went back to my room and spent all night contemplating whether it was possible in life not to be constantly let down. If it could ever be worth pinning your happiness to another person, when all other people ever seemed to do was disappear.”

— Olivia Sudjic

4. “I no longer felt I could try to belong with these people.”

— Olivia Sudjic

5. “Waking in the morning, I had to remember grief all over again. It was sunny, a white winter sun, and that made me sad.”

— Olivia Sudjic

6. “But I do not know the people I am crying for anymore. I don’t let myself sympathise – I think it would be wrong.”

— Olivia Sudjic

7. “To me, it was clear proof of the existence of supersymmetry, the idea that every particle has a partner. She was mine.”

— Olivia Sudjic

8. “I don’t know, I can’t know, but I almost did.”

— Olivia Sudjic

9. “When she did walk, to the bathroom between the chairs and the customers leaning back in them, oblivious to her manoeuvres, the sight felt strangely moving and profound, like a baby, or a veteran getting out of a wheelchair, or a deer in snow. That is perhaps overdoing it. Maybe I didn’t quite know that at the time, but it was striking. If you have not seen a deer in snow, I mean: moving with precision, but as if she might leap away in a completely different direction at any moment.”

— Olivia Sudjic

10. “A neon-pink 3 flickered and instantly disappeared again into the dark. The sight of it on my own device now made me sick. I held my finger down on the menu screen; each little app logo began to vibrate. I deleted the 3. I contemplated deleting everything. Cleaning it all away. The idea had a charm, a self-cancellation, many little suicides, a way to dispatch myself without actually going anywhere.”

— Olivia Sudjic

11. “The sky was always full of birdsong and evening smells, piano music from a window, the stone buildings glowing against the blue, like cream poured over something tart and hot.”

— Olivia Sudjic

12. “I watched us without interest, heard us only faintly, like strangers below my window.”

— Olivia Sudjic

13. “From watching Silvia, I’d learned that one of the worst things about being ill is that most people find your suffering opaque. With this sadness it was different. I felt that I needed to nurture and protect it from people’s understanding. I wanted Susy’s sympathy because I wanted comfort and to feel less alone, and yet I also didn’t want it – I didn’t want my personal grief to be part of something universal right then.”

— Olivia Sudjic

14. “It never ceased to amaze me how she just had the facts always, in her head. It occured to me that if, or when, she died, a whole load of facts, a body of knowledge, might disappear without a trace.”

— Olivia Sudjic

15. “But you’d hope anyone would feel sympathy if they actually saw someone face to face, pleading for a chance.”

— Olivia Sudjic

16. “Suddenly I had to laugh. It was like realising you definitely need to projectile vomit when you thought you had it under control in some imprisoning form of public space.”

— Olivia Sudjic

17. “She told me it was unlucky to share a reading with others, but the main point, the one I don’t mind mentioning because it seems relevant to the story, is that she said I had a kind of evil spirit following me. ‘Obviously,’ she added, ‘that sucks. But if we get you some amber –.”

— Olivia Sudjic

18. “The messages must be stuck somewhere in the tube of light underneath the ocean that connects London and New York.”

— Olivia Sudjic

19. “They seemed to despise each other, with a kind of loyalty.”

— Olivia Sudjic

20. “I had shelved expectations of another kiss; the intensity of not kissing now worked almost as well – the proximity and denial.”

— Olivia Sudjic

21. “I began to cry but maintained my shouting through it, like a wind through sheets of rain.”

— Olivia Sudjic

22. “If everything stays the same, it seems possible for someone to come back.”

— Olivia Sudjic

23. “Yeah!′ I said again, widening my eyes and nodding slowly but emphatically to show that she had seen into my own symmetrical soul.”

— Olivia Sudjic

24. “She hasn’t forgotten that I once called that thing she does, with the pins, Pinteresque.”

— Olivia Sudjic

25. “In the last week I felt her withdrawing. What was once everywhere, an ocean I imagined myself to be drowning in, was now barely deep enough to bathe in. I saw her warmth draining away and I couldn’t stop it.”

— Olivia Sudjic

26. “Things which had at first felt like signs, if I analysed them for too long, ended up feeling like the movements of my own reflection in dark glass.”

— Olivia Sudjic

27. “Was this what the city would look like when knowledge was no longer enough? When the desire to turn inward, surrendering entirely to one’s own private world of nonresistance, overwhelmed, like creeping ivy, our desire to know worlds beyond it?”

— Olivia Sudjic

28. “I don’t want to alarm anyone, but everywhere we go I see Alec Baldwin. It’s like he’s following us.”

— Olivia Sudjic

29. “When I read it now it’s like I have broken into a reality that is not mine, and when I step out of it, as if I had removed my headphones and heard the city again, it is easy to close the door behind me.”

— Olivia Sudjic

30. “It continues to impress me how fluently Americans, even immigrants like her, speak of their achievements.”

— Olivia Sudjic

31. “He had deduced also that I was quirky and promised me that he was too.”

— Olivia Sudjic

32. “Instantly I remembered everything I hated about him. But it was, in a way, comforting to know that he had not changed at all.”

— Olivia Sudjic

33. “The rejection was bigger than the present moment itself.”

— Olivia Sudjic

34. “But it is difficult to tell whether something is an oppurtunity or a trap when you are put on the spot.”

— Olivia Sudjic

35. “My ability to make up lies on the spot chills me as much as it saves me.”

— Olivia Sudjic

36. “The whole time I hadn’t slept with anyone at university had made it harder and harder to finally do it. Like spending too long on a very high diving board, until finally you have to exit ignominiously, the same way you climbed up.”

— Olivia Sudjic

37. “Maybe, as Mizuko said, we won’t even really die, just carry on in the feedback loop we are stuck in. Instead of connecting with new things, widening our worlds, algorithms have shrunk it to a narrow chamber with mirrored walls.”

— Olivia Sudjic

38. “She was convinced a word existed, a noun, that meant the loss of feelings for someone who was formerly loved – a word for the act of falling out of love. I said I couldn’t think of it. It wasn’t in the dictionary either, not the one she wanted.”

— Olivia Sudjic

39. “I wondered how best to demonstrate that we were kindred spirits.”

— Olivia Sudjic

40. “The street had that sad summertime feeling that you want to push on to see why it hurts.”

— Olivia Sudjic

41. “I found it hard to write the bits where the things that were at first surprising or even shocking became normal incrementally until I couldn’t see that they were anything but normal, because everything else had shifted just one centimetre here and one centimetre there, moving at the speed fingernails grow, until finally everything just clicked into exactly the wrong place.”

— Olivia Sudjic

42. “The sharp, superficial pain at being spoken to unkindly had obscured the deeper pain, which had not yet turned into something hard and heavy.”

— Olivia Sudjic

43. “I asked to use the bathroom and sat, recovering, on the edge of a marble bath on a dais – the kind Greek husbands are slain in.”

— Olivia Sudjic

44. “The emotional question became why Susy had rejected me. I was interested in that shift, from actively wanting to actively not wanting.”

— Olivia Sudjic