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“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

My plan was indeed to stay there forever.”
― 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

“In the last week I felt her withdrawing. What was once everywhere, an ocean I imagined myself to be drowning in, was now barely deep enough to bathe in. I saw her warmth draining away and I couldn't stop it.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“I watched us without interest, heard us only faintly, like strangers below my window.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“The sharp, superficial pain at being spoken to unkindly had obscured the deeper pain, which had not yet turned into something hard and heavy.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“If everything stays the same, it seems possible for someone to come back.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“From watching Silvia, I'd learned that one of the worst things about being ill is that most people find your suffering opaque. With this sadness it was different. I felt that I needed to nurture and protect it from people's understanding. I wanted Susy's sympathy because I wanted comfort and to feel less alone, and yet I also didn't want it—I didn't want my personal grief to be part of something universal right then.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“But I do not know the people I am crying for anymore. I don't let myself sympathise—I think it would be wrong.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“I don't know, I can't know, but I almost did.”
― 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

“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

“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

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

“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

“Man had such impenetrable means to stop the outside world from coming in, and so little to stop our inside world from surging out, wrestling any foreign object into submission.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“There was an extravagant winter storm outside. The tinfoil sky flashed beyond the window, rattling in the frame, and once or twice a white fork like a vein. Through the opposite window, which looked out onto the other side of the house, the light was pale, picking out where the wall was still broken from the last big storm, with the scorched telegraph pole and the burnt tree.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“I was worried that if I told her the story, she would identify with it too much. That her sympathy, however well-meaning, would make me possessive, angry again. She was always making things personal, seeing only their relationship to her rather than what was complex about them.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“It is 23.32 p.m. I still believe in symmetry, so this will be the last part. You've reached an end if you come back to where you started. I also remain superstitious about certain numbers. I use 23 and 32 for my lottery tickets, for example. It extends to dates. I still see signs.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“I saw a doctor. I went in case there were any remnants of the summer inside me—sticky, slender fish bones that needed to be scraped into the bin. He was dismissive of my concerns and said my body would have let me know by now. Did I have what was known as female intuition? I said I'd had my feminine intuition somewhat scrambled in the past.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“Since I've moved here a Chinese takeaway on the main street has ominiously renamed itself from whatever it was before to the Golden Bowl, but other than that, the landscape is the last place on earth that might call Mizuko to mind.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“For a while this seemed to do the trick, and I felt that whatever contamination I had helped to spread, the boundaries I had helped to break, sprinkling flakes of myself all over the surface of New York like so much fish food, had been forgiven.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“Working out that I am not Mizuko has been an important step towards feeling better. If I have hit on a moral, it is this: the body is our natural barrier. There were lines I should not have crossed, and I did so without permission. I was looking always for correspondences, but meaning is found through difference.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“But I can't help thinking of the shock I felt when I finally realised it was winter, on exiting Mizuko's apartment. The summer was long gone, but I hadn't noticed until then.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy