Alexander Chee said this quote

The secret to being a rider in the hippodrome wasn't just that you must be agile, or that you must be good with horses, or that you must be strong and steady as the horse careens to the far end of the arena and back with you riding on its back. It was that you must hide inside your costume a little of a killer's heart.The animal will be tender with you, and you with it, but the animal never forgets that when what it wants for survival requires your death, it will become unafraid to kill you. And so you cannot forget this, either.It is, on reflection, good training to be a courtesan. A woman of any kind.

~ Alexander Chee

Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.

~ Alexander Chee

Sappho isn't really meant to be read. It's meant to be sung and there were dances for the songs, also. Sappho was a performance artist, and now she exists as a textual project. She was saved by her critics, and by people who wrote of her in letters to each other. As the morning sun lathers the pool through the long windows and stripes the opposite walls in gold, I look at the fragment translations. She's paper, too. A paper poet for a paper boy. People claim to be translating her but they don't, really, they use her to write poems from as they fill in the gaps in the fragments. A duet. She may have meant for these to be solos but they're duets now, though the second singer blends in with the first. The first singer in this case is offstage, like in the old days of stars who couldn't sing, a real singer hidden behind a curtain, which is the velvet drape of history.

~ Alexander Chee

You are never lost in sorrow, it seems to me, ever. You do know the way. In fact, you don't think there's any other. Sorrow seemed to me to be more like a road would through life, through the days of your life, like the old Roman ruins near the Tuileries or the rue d'Enfer -- underneath this life, but never really apart from it.

~ Alexander Chee