Top 66 Mary H.K. Choi Quotes

Never post anything personal to your Facebook wall. Or anyone else’s, for that matter. Only snitches and teachers look at Facebook.

Try life as your own boss, on your own voyage. No daily commute. No salad bar at 12:15. No cc’ing about the meeting.

I love my mother a not-normal amount.

The thing about living in New York as a writer is that you hit that age where it feels like everyone has a book all at the same time. It’s like that one year where you’re invited to twenty weddings.

When I moved to New York City from Texas at 22, amateur hour was over. As a newly grown-up person, I vowed I would wear dresses and skirts, wool trousers occasionally, and heels always.

Pedicures are disgraceful.

I’m great at leaving. I am less talented at getting left, though I should be better, given how much it’s happened.

I like science a whole bunch, but I love ‘The X-Files’ more – I want to believe.

The notion of this ’emergency contact’ is, Do you have someone who is holding you down? Do you know where to go if you’re feeling bad? I keep likening it to assigning yourself a godparent of your choosing.

‘Emergency Contact’ is about the anxiousness that is inherent in meat space interactions.

If there was a button that I could push that would agog my brain to the level that I felt first seeing ‘Avatar’ in its entirety and another one for food pellets, I would die of starvation.

Twenty-thirteen was the year I got super into SoulCycle.

If you’re holding your iPhone, and it’s the newest iteration of it, you’re like, ‘Oh, famous people have my phone. Captains of industry have my phone.’ And that can be an intoxicating experience for someone who is going off to college for the first time.

A fanboy’s heart is filled with love, enthusiasm, and insecurity.

I do not care for musicals. In fact, I hate them.

I would never give up ‘The Wire,’ ‘Breaking Bad,’ and ‘Game of Thrones.’ I’m grateful for all these expensive, excellent, graphically ambitious programs.

You are overwhelmed, overscheduled, and dejected because you keep trying to have it all – or at least most of it. You want a fulfilling job and personal life, and it’s not working. The way out? Work more.

Privateers, military contractors – these aren’t pirates. They have bosses. Real pirates are sellswords on missions of their own making.

I’m just going to write whatever I’m going to write, and whatever shelf or section they end up on at the bookstore is just going to be that, and I’ll let the marketing people pull their hair out and worry about it.

Home is where my house pants live. And they’re hideous.

When I was five, I compound-fractured my arm, pulverising my elbow.

The thing about leaving New York is that you can come back.

If you are someone’s emergency contact – you are their person, and they are your person – there is work involved.

Jockeying for a popularity position has been a valorized teen tradition since the notion of a discrete teen stage of life was invented.

‘Avatar’ is staggering. It’s seismic. Evolutionarily speaking, it is cladogenesis in a thunderclap.

Part of me just wants ‘Jane’ magazine back, and ‘Sassy,’ too.

By the time you’re in your 30s, unless somebody makes the god-awful decision to gift you with a cooking class or salsa lessons, it may have been a while since you learnt something new.

I’m a big believer in puking out all your thoughts in a single sitting and getting some version of the work down, because the alternative just prolongs the agony. The first draft is hideous and ajskdlkdfksjdfslfjk, but it’s just a map for where the big blocks go.

Have passion, yes, but acknowledge that side projects are still work. They shake things up, just like switching up your workout helps you stay one step ahead of your torpid metabolism. They scramble the synapses.

Manhattan, after eight years here, still reminds me of Hong Kong. There are parts of Chinatown that are the spit and image of streets in Wan Chai, and I am held in thrall by the Chrysler building as much as I was by I.M. Pei’s Bank of China Tower.

Pirates, me hearties, are the Patronus of the freelancer.

When you have tools with which to stalk everyone all the time, the most seemingly aloof person wins.

I always get super confused by the way we look at technology, because since when were all phone calls created equal? It’s not like every text is the same or that all texts are human interactions that are compromised. I don’t get how conduits somehow dictate sentiment.

My mom is an excellent mom. She knows I am irascible, prickly, and antisocial. She knows that most human interaction makes me tired and that I either scare people away with precise invectives or trot out the fakest, nicest skinjob of myself because it requires zero effort.

I’m a sucker when it comes to under-explored human potential and ‘stuff that makes you be better.’

I’m pretty sure I peaked at 15.

I roll my eyes at the grandstanding blowhards who have ‘fixed’ themselves, but I keep up with the gizmos and apps that track people’s various rhythms. I’m no lifelogger or body-hacker, but I’m curious, and I want to be in-tune enough to know what’s really the matter so I can level up and be at my most awesome.

I love New York, but sometimes New York is so mean to you.

When I was small, I thought I was just cooler than my mom because of how foreign she is. She’s really foreign. You’d think it would kill her to get store-bought snacks, she’s that foreign.

I was born in Korea and left before my first birthday.

Never post boring back-to-back selfies.

I just love the comics industry.

There’s a really generous readership with YA.

Do you know why we pay trainers and nutritionists? Because having to muster interest in the minor successes of someone else’s journey toward pedestrian-ass healthiness is taxing and should be compensated.

Nothing is more untoward than a grown man tasking another with snapping a pic expressly so he can ‘flex the ‘fit.’ It’s tacky -self-aggrandizing – and speaks to an existential neediness typically reserved for failed actresses and phenomenally successful rappers.

From the first time I harangued my mother into buying me a pair of platform sandals at the irascible and persistent age of 11, I’ve worn heels.

I find texting to be kind of a safe space.

I have a lot of respect for people who write a whole book because I’ve heard it will kill you.

In order to be a good emergency contact, you need a lot of friend-patience and empathy. Often, this comes from personal experience with anxiety, trauma, and depression.

For my first job interview out of college, I wore a cream-colored cotton suit with cap sleeves and an inverted box pleat skirt that was appropriate for the late-August heat – and wildly discordant with the Red Hook offices of the graffiti magazine I had called twice to find.

Learning to ride a bike in a public park means anyone can see you.

Nothing beats SoulCycle for dumbing all the way out or re-calibrating a mood in less than an hour, which is reassuring, since I typically wake up in a panic that’s candy-coated with a low-grade rage.

The second single from ‘Purpose,’ Justin Bieber’s fourth studio album, ‘Sorry’ is an infectious confection – a Dorito for your ears.

Join a Bikram-flow-yoga, Flywheel, or Pilates class so you can find spiritual oneness amid grunting socialite moms. Do whatever you want. Just, please, for the love of God, stop talking about it.

Consider this: alms aside, Wikipedia is fueled by competitive pedantry and emo-ness. How great is that?

For people who deal with anxiety or depression or can’t be in large social groups cognitively, emotionally, or even physically, phones help bridge the gap.

There is so much focus on being self-sufficient, and it makes it very difficult to ask for things. I’ve been crippled by this notion of high-functioning self-sufficiency. And I see it a lot in younger girls. Asking for help brings people closer in a way that I suspected but didn’t actually put into practice.

I am anti-Halloween.

Instagram is not a place for tone or irony.

I love small-business owners, and I actually love the idea of vintage clothing, but I don’t get when they pretend that the Internet doesn’t exist or that other customers have never been to the whole rest of the country where you can rummage around and buy the same dang belt for a buck and a half.

If you can relate to what another person is going through while giving their experience room to be its own discrete thing, you’re probably a crackerjack emergency contact.

You always feel like a hack and a fraud when you’re writing. It’s just how it goes.

Yes, Justin Bieber is a contrivance. Yes, Justin Bieber’s lyrics are insipid – worse still, disingenuous. Yes, his tattoos stink. Yes, he’s lousy at skateboarding. But what does any of this actually matter? In case you missed it, Bieber won.

Even the coolest jobs get stultifying with repetition, and the only way to break that cycle is to bring another job into the mix.

LaCroix sparkling water is absolutely delicious.