Olivia Sudjic Quotes

“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

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

“Yes, I think he even has a title. He's like son and heir.'

I turned her words over in my mind as I pretended to play with my phone.

Sun and hair
Son and heir
Sun and air”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“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.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“Was this what the city would look like when knowledge was no longer enough? When the desire to turn inward, surrendering entirely to one's own private world of nonresistance, overwhelmed, like creeping ivy, our desire to know worlds beyond it?”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“I also found it hard to accept the Mizuko I'd known in multiple miniatures was one physical person. I suppose it would feel the same waking up in bed with Jesus or Father Christmas, or any long-dead figurehead of an ancient cult. You know every word of every doctrine off by heart and then you see their toenails, gums, and vertebrae, not in pieces but all held together, and it's hard not to lose your shit.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“Some people in the town did not seem to care about the festival and were watching football on TV. The players were dotted about in neon green. They looked unreal, the way they might be seen by the forgotten man in the moon and the rabbit if they were watching the floodlit pitch forlornly from above.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“I was on the sidewalk, buffering, wondering if it was okay to follow people in real life.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“So there was no explicit bonding. Certainly not the kind you might be expecting if you like films like The Parent Trap as much as Mizuko and I did. We watched it together once, and I dared to say that we were like two little Lindsay Lohans in the isolation cabin, to which she made a kind of grunt.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy