Quotessence
Home / Authors / Olivia Sudjic

Olivia Sudjic Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

AllOlivia SudjicSympathySimileMetaphorHumorSadSignsSoulmatesTechnologyUnrequited Love

Famous Olivia Sudjic Quotes

“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.”

DescriptionSympathySimileOlivia Sudjic
Book:Sympathy
Create image

“That night I dreamt about the roses laid at the wrong feet—the feet of the nurse. Each bit of the dream was like a hyperlink. I pressed on one, wanting answers, and it took me to another. I could never get to the meaning at the bottom of any of the bits. When I reached for the petals of the roses, I was touching a metal seatbelt buckle in a coach, driving by night through a remote place, with a band of mist running parallel to the glass I leant against.”

DreamTechnologyDreamsComputerSympathySimileOlivia Sudjic
Book:Sympathy
Create image

“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.”

Mental IllnessWrongSympathyOlivia SudjicUnreliable NarratorSkewed
Book:Sympathy
Create image

“Though I did not know her exact address, that she appeared to live almost within breathing distance of Robin, and that I lived with him, and that her pictures showed that she was now dating the mysterious Rupert Hunter, our despotic mothers, our absent fathers, the borders we had both crossed, all our many parallels and connections at every point, could not be chance. I saw it as evidence of the hidden connections between things, an all-powerful algorithm that sifted through chaos, singling out soulmates.”

FateConnectionsSympathySoulmatesInterconnectednessOlivia Sudjic
Book:Sympathy
Create image

“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.”

SufferingUnderstandingGriefSadnessSickIllSympathyPersonalTitleOlivia Sudjic
Book:Sympathy
Create image

“I hope when this is done I'll be able to get back into my happy gardening vibe that was so healthy for me. I want to go back to my routine and my morning ritual with the compost, but it will probably be that my life will split in two. New Leaf Gardening in Wood Green will be happening in parallel to a fantasy that runs along the bottom of that screen like a ticker. Alice will be fine. Rabbit will stay up tonight, and every night. Resending and resending, reopening the page to see if she has responded, if anyone has. The spinning wheel will make my eyes hurt and everything else will go dark.”

WaitingTechnologySadComputerObsessedSympathyHauntingEndingOlivia SudjicLast LinesSplit
Book:Sympathy
Create image

“It's hard to explain how an infatuation actually starts. It's a state so all-encompassing that it's almost impossible to remember how it felt to live inside your own head before it began. Everything that precedes it becomes a pathway that was always leading there. Time before is valuable only as a resource with which to create a persona, to bind the object of the infatuation closer. I had given my (partially fabricated) past life to Mizuko to make a story that in the end never got told. Or not by her. It is also hard to explain the intensity of the infatuation itself. There is rarely an explanation that seems reasonable to anyone but you. Unless you're part of a cult or viral phenomenon, so that when you weep outside the object of your infatuation's hotel room, you do so in the company of millions.”

ObsessionSympathyInfatuationHysteriaOlivia Sudjic
Book:Sympathy
Create image

“The glow of the steetlamps sat heavy and thick above me. As I walked aimlessly, in the direction of downtown, I returned to my theories. That Mizuko and I shared the pictorial equivalent of DNA. That a sympathetic magic existed between us, no matter how far apart we were pulled. That we defied physical laws of time and space, waves, gravity, the rules laid down by physicists which governed our physical universe (earthquakes, tsunamis) and physical bodies. And yet somehow our connection had led to the opposite of intimacy. My search had led to its opposite. I had never felt so isolated and disconnected, even from myself.”

IntimacyConnectionSympathySoulmatesIsolatedDisconnectedOlivia SudjicNot EnoughSympathetic Magic
Book:Sympathy
Create image

“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.”

TechnologySuicideSocial MediaSympathyAppsSelf DestructiveOlivia SudjicSmartphone
Book:Sympathy
Create image

“Begin at the beginning. Know nothing. Tabula rasa. At the same time, part of me wanted to distinguish myself. To let her sense the bond we shared straightaway. Maybe subtly hint at some of my secret intelligence. A secret handshake. A nod. I now completely understood how criminal masterminds could so easily get caught before the big reveal—the temptation to boast about the execution was huge.”

SympathyVillainsOlivia SudjicBig RevealCriminal Masterminds
Book:Sympathy
Create image

“Have you ever truly, keenly felt like you don't know who you are? Do you ever do something and think, Who is at the controls? Like some mad pilot has locked you out of the cockpit? I definitely do. I feel a kind of vertigo that makes me shake afterwards. I guess we all feel it when making a difficult-seeming choice, and sometimes you seriously don't know what you want because you don't know who you're supposed to be, or who you want to be. Physics, my first and second families, my philosophy degree, had all failed to help me answer that question. The former has led me to wonder whether I am one of an infinite number of Alices in multiple universes. A quantum fuck-up, which is someone who fucks up in every one of those universes but in different ways.”

IdentityUncertaintyDecision MakingFinding YourselfSympathyMultiverseOut Of ControlOlivia Sudjic
Book:Sympathy
Create image