Sympathy Quotes

“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.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“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, Sympathy

“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, Sympathy

“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, Sympathy

“My reflections amount to a love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there. The things for which she was not there have her in them now more deeply because of her absence, and her effect on my way of seeing them. Anytime I note her absence from a thing, she arrives at once, as if summoned, entrenching herself more deeply than she exists in my memories of times when she was there, so that time, the sequence of what really happened, seems to curve around her.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“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, Sympathy

“He told me things about himself that should have made him sound urbane but did the opposite. He told me, for example, that he liked Steve Reich's music, modern-art museums, and Beat poetry. These words flew out of his mouth and went boomeranging back as if they knew they weren't meant to take the conversation anywhere but back to him. He also explained that he really liked interacting with different kinds of people. When I didn't immediately respond to this, he repeated it, and so I assured him I believed it.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“I no longer felt I could try to belong with these people.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“Roses are like kamikaze love pilots.
Roses are like suicide love bombers.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“My ability to make up lies on the spot chills me as much as it saves me.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“Tokyo was a place you could quite happily exist alone and be self-contained. It seemed to promise that it was better to be by yourself.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“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.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“I know I only want him,' she said between sobs, the syllables all wrong, 'because he doesn't want me. How is that even possible?'

'It's normal to want what we can't have,' I said soothingly.

'No, I mean how can he not want me?”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“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, Sympathy

“Well, then, what's the plan now? You can't stay here forever.'

My plan was indeed to stay there forever.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“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, Sympathy

“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, Sympathy

“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.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“We rarely get the chance to see things anew. I remember a Latin translation that caused me to fail an exam at school because one of the words, translated for us at the bottom of the page and intended to help, was invalid. I read this to mean false, null, illegal. The opposite of valid. But it was meant to be understood as invalid as in a sick person. It torpedoed my entire translation. Instead of tending to the sick, priests were being accused of fraudulence and neglecting their duties. Even though it didn't match up with the grammar, or the story, I kept on returning to that word to check, and every time I saw it only as I had done already—invalid, null, void.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“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, Sympathy

“No order, no pattern, just chaos. Lots of little universes separated by invisible screens . . .”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

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

“Have you ever tried to organise a threesome in real life?'

I shook my head. I'd only encountered them in porn, but it seemed to happen without much admin, the same way all porn skipped out the granular details of sex, like condoms and kissing, that were supposed to happen in real life.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“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, Sympathy

“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.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“I became convinced that I was being watched.

Because self was still leaking everywhere, a part of me began to think it was Mizuko rather than a stranger. I hoped that there might still be a reunion. I hoped it in the shy, sly way hope comes out of the jar, the mistranslated box, last—after everything and everyone else has escaped.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“The messages must be stuck somewhere in the tube of light underneath the ocean that connects London and New York.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“I felt my own self-sufficiency, my own Walden Pond, seeping out of me as if I'd sprung a leak. Self soaked into everything around me—the floor, the walls, the one window, the grass. The words on the page.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“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, Sympathy

“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, Sympathy