My Education Quotes

“I didn't grasp that desire and duty could rival each other, least of all that they most often did.”
― Susan Choi, My Education

“So perhaps it was her grief I felt as I gazed on this child not mine, and not even much of a child anymore. Grief not for him, nor for Martha exactly, but for all my lost selves, which I liked to imagine were still somehow there, waiting for my return. But those selves were long gone. I would never be younger again. This was so simple it went without saying, but unsaid, one could try to forget it.”
― Susan Choi, My Education

“At the moment, I think we each genuinely believed ourselves to be the protagonist, and the other a naive and pardonable walk-on whose role might even have a tragic end. Still, it was good to trade compassion in that large and chilly room, regardless if one of us, or perhaps both of us, would turn out to be mistaken.”
― Susan Choi, My Education

“Coup de foudre; perhaps it was real. One went from believing, when twenty, that it was the one kind of love that was real, to believing, once closer to forty, that it was not only fragile but false--the inferior, infantile, doomed love of twenty-year-olds. Somewhere between, the norms of one culture of love were discarded, and those of the other assumed. When did it happen, at midnight of one's thirty-first birthday? On the variable day that, while browsing a grocery-store aisle with a man, the repeating refrain of the rest of one's life for the first time resounds in one's ear?”
― Susan Choi, My Education

“My youth was the most stubborn, peremptory part of myself. In my most relaxed moments, it governed my being. It pricked up its ears at the banter of eighteen-year-olds on the street. It frankly examined their bodies. It did not know its place: that my youth governed me with such ease didn't mean I was young. It meant I was divided as if housing a stowaway soul, rife with itches and yens which demanded a stern vigilance. I didn't live thoughtlessly in my flesh anymore. My body had not, in its flesh, fundamentally changed quite so much as it now could intuit the change that would only be dodged by an untimely death, and to know both those bodies at once, the youthful, and the old, was to me the quintessence of being middle-aged. Now I saw all my selves, even those that did not yet exist, and the task was remembering which I presented to others.”
― Susan Choi, My Education

“I couldn't let you believe we'd keep going, when we'd already lasted too long.”
― Susan Choi, My Education

“The very moment I admitted we were flirting, I lost patience for it.”
― Susan Choi, My Education

“And I remembered now, too, my inadvertent youthful condescension, when the woman had said, apologizing for some information she couldn't recall, "I still remember the coat I wore when I was five, but I have no idea what I ate for breakfast today." I'd laughed and smiled in warm sympathy. How sweet, I had thought, she remembers her coat. She must have loved it not to have forgotten. But the coat wouldn't ask any effort of preservation. Feeling ninety, and no longer five, there would be the real effort. Telling that five-year old girl, in her beautiful coat, You're all finished. Submerged. Obsolete.

We are ghosts of ourselves, and of others, and all of these ghosts appear perfectly real.”
― Susan Choi, My Education

“I had opened the obvious drawer, the top drawer of the room's only dresser, and found myself gazing into a masculine cache of compressed, crumpled things. Wash-worn Brooks Brothers white cotton shorts now a pale shade of gray. Snake-tangled, unpaired argyle socks, all in bright Easter colors like clover ad mauve which still showed fairly crisp near the tops, but down toward the heels were marred by thread pills and snags, and at the toes by the outright abjection of holes. To see laid bare in their entirety those socks, of which I'd heretofore glimpsed only brief merry stripes, when a pant cuff rose up from the rim of a shoe, was like seeing the man himself fully exposed to me--naked.”
― Susan Choi, My Education

“Something crossed his face, a pure motion like wind over water--I couldn't have guessed what emotion it was. "I'll miss you," he said.”
― Susan Choi, My Education

“I had never had a lover so unafraid of a future with me—and not just unafraid, but determined on it. The past didn’t matter to Matthew because in the past, we had not been together—and this was a belief, like some religious beliefs, I suspected might benefit me if I shared it.”
― Susan Choi, My Education

“So perhaps it was her grief I felt as I gazed on this child not mine, and not even much of a child anymore. Grief not for him, nor for Martha exactly, but for all my lost selves, which I liked to imagine were still somehow there, waiting for my return. But those selves were long gone. I would never be younger again. This was so simple it went without saying, but unsaid, one could try to forget it.”
― Susan Choi, My Education

“like to say I defied gravity just as often as feeling its snare, but my efforts were more likely spent clinging on with white knuckles to not be dislodged. Still, that was my heroism—my tenacious fidelity to her, though it was based on a grave misperception. I thought desire was duty. No trial could not be endured nor impediment smashed in desire’s holy service, or so I believed, with naïve righteousness. I didn’t grasp that desire and duty could rival each other, least of all that they most often do.”
― Susan Choi, My Education

“Appetite knows what it craves, without cerebral embellishment. It tends not to waste any time laying hold of its tools. That was the thing I had recognised here: appetite. I recognised it precisely because, in a context like this, it was so unfamiliar. It had forced me to rule out everything else. And there was a second reason for my recognition, which because unprecedented was not recognition at all, but astounding discovery: Martha's face told me. I saw appetite there...”
― Susan Choi, My Education