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How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays QUOTES

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays QUOTES

1 " What would you read to someone who was dying? Annie Dillard had asked our class. She wanted this to be the standard for our work. There, at the memorial service for my friend, I thought of another: Dying, what stories would you tell? "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

2 " ...the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure and success. "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

3 " There's a reason that whenever fascists come to power, the writers are among the first to go to jail. "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

4 " ...believing trouble is gone forever is the beginning of a special kind of trouble. "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

5 " It isn't just that you fall in love with someone—you each allow yourself new identities with each other, new skins, almost like a cocoon to who you'll be next. "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

6 " I was by now used to people being surprised by me and my background, and their surprise offended me. I was always having to be what I was looking for in the world, wishing the person I would become already existed — some other I before me. I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was. "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

7 " I tilt my head back and carefully toss my hair over my right shoulder in the way I have seen my younger sister do. I realize I know one more thing about her than I did before - what it feels like to do this and why you would. It’s like your own little thunderclap. "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

8 " To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth, but into it. "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

9 " ...you can lose more than you thought possible and still grow back, stronger than anyone imagined. "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

10 " When I am gripped with despair, when I think I might stop, I speak to my dead. Tell them a story. What am I doing with this life? They hold me accountable. I let them make me bolder or more modest or louder or more moving, but I ask them to listen, and then write. "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

11 " The story of your life, described, will not describe how you came to think about your life or yourself, nor describe any of what you learned. This is what fiction can do - I think it is even what fiction is for. "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

12 " Destroying art is practice for destroying people. "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

13 " Yes, everything's been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing makes it possible. "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

14 " WE ARE NOT WHAT we think we are. The stories we tell of ourselves are like thin trails across something that is more like the ocean. A mask afloat on the open sea. There were moments before the memory’s return when I experienced what I now understand as its absence as not a gap but a whole other self, a whole other me. As if a copy of me had secretly replaced me. An android of me moving through the landscape, independent of the other me, exactly like me but not me. Every now and then, I could see the distance between us. Three times, in particular, this other self had appeared before me. "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

15 " My job is to make something happen in a space barely larger than the span of your hand, behind your eyes, distilled out of all that I have carried, from friends, from teachers, people met on planes, people I have only seen in my mind, every favorite book, until it meets and distills from you, the reader, something out of the everything it finds in you. All of this meets along the edge of a sentence like this one, as if the sentence is a fence, with you on one side and me on the other. When the writing works best, I feel like I could poke one of these words out of place and find the writer's eye there, looking through to me. "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

16 " The weight of him pressed me out. I felt covered, safe; something dark in me retreated and, for what felt like the first time in the arms of a man, I felt safe. I was still me -- the switch was not flicked, but the terrible feeling haunting me then didn't reach me. Which is one of the things that love can feel like. Peter stayed there for some time. He may have fallen asleep at some point. And so it is that when I hear stories of how thin he became, I can't reconcile them with the weight of the boy who pinned me to myself, made me feel the place in me where I attached to the world. "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

17 " Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It's not rocket science; it's habits of mind and habits of work. "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

18 " Much of what I love about literature is also what I love about the Tarot - archetypes at play, hidden forces, secrets brought to light. When I bought the deck, it was for the same reason I bought the car: I felt too much like a character in a novel, buffeted by cruel turns of fate. I wanted to feel powerful in the face of my fate. I wanted to look over the top of my life and see what was coming. I wanted to be the main character of this story, and its author. And if I were writing a novel about someone like me, this is exactly what would lead him astray. "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

19 " There are two kinds of people, I think: those who want to know the future and those who do not. I've never met anyone ambivalent about this. I have been both kinds. For now, I think I know which one is better, but I'm prepared to change my mind again. It may be I am like that drunk who tells himself he can handle his alcohol now. But if I told you I could tell the future, you would laugh at me. And I would laugh at me too. "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

20 " Most people misunderstand the crime of sexual abuse. They think of stolen youth, a child tucked under the arm and spirited away. But it isn’t like someone entering your house and stealing something from you. Instead, someone leaves something with you that grows until it replaces you. They themselves were once replaced this way, and what they leave with you they have carried for years within them, like a fire guarded all this time as it burned them alive inside, right under the skin. The burning hidden to protect themselves from being revealed as burned. You imagine that the worst thing is that someone would know. The attention you need to heal you have been taught will end you. And it will—it will end the pain you have mistaken for yourself. The worst thing is not that someone would know. The worst thing is that you might lay waste to your whole life by hiding. "

― Alexander Chee , How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays