Trust Exercise Quotes

“Thoughts are often false. A feeling's always real. Not true, just real”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“To David, love meant declaration. Wasn't that the whole point? To Sarah, love meant a shared secret. Wasn't that the whole point?”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“And right away her gaze went hard with the anger we always feel at the person who spoils our idea of ourself.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“Once you’re old enough to recognize a hole in yourself it’s too late for the hole to be filled.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“All kids want such glamorous knowledge. The darkness of it. The hardness of it. The realness of it. The cold fact that life really is fucked. And Sarah, with her Morrissey T-shirts and her unfiltered Camels and her sleep deprivation and her willful compliance with sexual hungers, she's been asking for this awful dispossession, with one mind she's been hot on its trail, and now that she's got it she longs to go back. If she could only go back, and eat the sandwich her mother packed her, with its thoughtful tomato.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“Possibly first love, despite all the fuss, is only mating with ideas attached.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“Obsession is an accidental haunting, by a person not aware she’s a ghost. I knew Sarah was my ghost, but she’d forgotten I even existed.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“I always knew I was one of the ones who would leave.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“Love was some kind of of chemical error.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“Heartbreak doesn't flow through the heart but along that frail shallow canal of the sternum.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“They were all children who had previously failed to fit in, or had failed, to the point of acute misery, to feel satisfied, and they had seized on creative impulse in the hope of salvation.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“just drive. “Sarah, I want to share with you something. I think it will help you. Young people like you experience pain more intensely than those of us just a bit older. I speak of emotional pain. Your pain is greater, in duration and strength. It is harder to bear. This is not a metaphor. It is a fact, of physiology. Of psychology. Your emotional sensitivity—it is superior to that of your parents, your teachers. That is why these years of your life, when you are fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, are so difficult, but also so important. That is why developing your talent at this age is so crucial. This heightened emotional pain is a gift. A difficult gift.” Despite herself, she’s listening. “Are you saying,” she manages after a while, “that in the future, when I’m older, things won’t hurt as much?” “Yes, exactly. But Sarah, I am saying something else. Don’t turn away from the pain. When you are older, yes, you will be harder. That is a blessing and a curse.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“Girls are complicated. They rarely love each other without also hating each other.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“What really pissed me off about what you wrote," Karen tried to tell Sarah as Sarah knelt screaming by Martin, as if Sarah had just one stage direction but was going to do it for all she was worth, "is how you wrote so much just like it happened, and then left out the actual truth. Why even do that? Who do you think you're protecting?”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“that acting was truthful emotions in false circumstances.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“We never know, when life reunites us with someone, how closely our stories will match.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“It was part of the excruciating in-betweenness of no longer being children, yet lacking those powers enjoyed by adults.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“We almost never know what we know until after we know it.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“REMEMBER THE IMPOSSIBLE eventfulness of time, transformation and emotion packed like gunpowder into the barrel. Remember the dilation and diffusion, the years within days. Theirs were endless; lives flowered and died between waking and noon.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“She would do anything to obtain her own car. She would prostitute herself or rob or kill if it meant she could have her own car.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“She had expected this because they were adults. Yet she'd gone off with them because they didn't behave like adults, so that she couldn't understand, now, whether they'd deserted her or whether she'd been stupid to expect otherwise.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“It was interesting, actually, how everyone’s primary feeling-state at that moment was disguised as a different emotion. Sarah’s repulsion at being reunited with Liam took the form of outrage at Martin. Liam’s passion for Sarah took the form of concern for Karen. And Karen’s unbearable humiliation, which she had always expected and never expected, took the form of emotionlessness and not caring. “I”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“That glimpse, of herself alone at the heart of his gaze, only lasted an instant. His indifference to their audience struck her as a dare or a test. She didn’t see as a counterindication to this angry idea of hers his hot blush as deep as her own; if her face was as red as a beet, his was red as a burn, he’d come out in lurid blotches that overlapped with his boy’s patchy stubble to make a mess of his face.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“Their romance has started in earnest this summer, but the prologue took up the whole previous year. All fall and spring of the previous year they lived with exclusive reference to each other, and were viewed as an unspoken duo by everyone else.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“Intuition only tells them what they want, not how to achieve it,”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“The vast southern city they lived in was rich in land, poor in everything else—no bodies of water, no drainage, no hills, no topographical variety of any sort, no public transportation or even the awareness of the lack of such a thing.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“Why is solitude so fucking hard to achieve?”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“Is that some other creature with me, in the darkness?”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“Why, asked the actors onstage, had their friend killed himself? And why not? asked the others who argued with them. It was his Self to keep or destroy. Why should customs or, God forbid, laws interfere with the ways we dispose of our Selves.
Because we're none of us alone in this world. We injure each other.
Why should another be injured by choices I make for my Self?
You're choosing for another when you make choices. We overlap. We get tangled. You can't help but hurt.
That's a load of BS! Anyone tangled with me got that way by a choice of their own. If I shoot myself, they had fair warning.
What warned them?
The plain knowledge that I wasn't them.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

“Another of Karen's observations about people who drink is that their drunkenness doesn't steadily accumulate like snow building up. It has valleys and peaks, of confusion and relative clearness. Although the confusion gets steadily worse, and the relative clearness gets steadily cloudy, there keep being these moments of reaching a peak, where the drunk person thinks she can see. She feels certain she isn't that drunk.”
― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise