Top 98 Quotes & Sayings by Mary H.K. Choi

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a South Korean author Mary H.K. Choi.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Mary H.K. Choi is a Korean American author, editor, television and print journalist. She is the author of the young adult novels Emergency Contact (2018) and Permanent Record (2019). She is the culture correspondent on Vice News Tonight on HBO and was previously a columnist at Wired and Allure magazines as well as a freelance writer.

South Korean - Author

Source: Wikipedia

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

Mary H.K. Choi

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

Mary H.K. Choi

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.

Mary H.K. Choi

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.

Mary H.K. Choi

Never hold up your entire group of friends in real life trying to capture a perfect Instagram pose. Nobody cares.

Mary H.K. Choi

Food rules. Little rivals the pleasure of tearing into a glistening burger.

Mary H.K. Choi

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

Mary H.K. Choi

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.

Mary H.K. Choi

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.

Mary H.K. Choi

SoulCycle feels gross, is gross, and I'm grateful to have found it.

Mary H.K. Choi

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.

Mary H.K. Choi

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

Mary H.K. Choi

In New York, you collect a thousand encounters a year, a passel of handshakes, a zillion air-kisses, and boatloads of business cards that you pitch into your purse and eventually deposit your chewing gum into. Amid this break-neck montage of glancing contacts, I'm tormented by the constant thrumming fear of being fingered as a flake.

Mary H.K. Choi

Rihanna's boots are too scared to look bad on Rihanna.

Mary H.K. Choi

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

Mary H.K. Choi

Teens are strange and magical.

Mary H.K. Choi

Home is where I climb out of my mecha-suit-of-a-poised-persona and power down.

Mary H.K. Choi

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.

Mary H.K. Choi

I'm pretty sure I peaked at 15.

Mary H.K. Choi

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.

Mary H.K. Choi

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

Mary H.K. Choi

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.

Mary H.K. Choi

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.

Mary H.K. Choi

Your mom is the first person you fall in love with, so it's loaded forever and carries all this baggage. There's almost always a communication barrier in place. In my case it's a language and cultural barrier, but other times, it's because your mother's love is conditional or because you're fundamentally different.

Mary H.K. Choi

'Awkward' is a ubiquitous teen word to denote socially unsanctioned behavior. It usually implies first- or secondhand embarrassment when you or a friend step outside the rules. Awkward doesn't sound overtly judgmental or negative; it's deliberately vague.

Mary H.K. Choi

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

Mary H.K. Choi

Wikipedia's a collaborative experiment akin to Simon Winchester's account of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary in 'The Professor and the Madman,' which outlines James Murray's mission to produce the tome in the 19th century.

Mary H.K. Choi

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

Mary H.K. Choi

Instagram is not a place for tone or irony.

Mary H.K. Choi

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.

Mary H.K. Choi

Never post food on your Instagram. Nobody cares, and only old people do it.

Mary H.K. Choi

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

Mary H.K. Choi

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

Mary H.K. Choi

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.

Mary H.K. Choi

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

Mary H.K. Choi

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.

Mary H.K. Choi

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.

Mary H.K. Choi

I cannot quantify the physics of friendships and do not know exactly how much intense pressure can be applied before these glittery, brittle bonds break.

Mary H.K. Choi

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.

Mary H.K. Choi

Pedicures are disgraceful.

Mary H.K. Choi

People bursting into song in unison and then pointing it at me is maybe the worst thing I can think of, never mind that you have to pay good money to go be yelled/danced at.

Mary H.K. Choi

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

Mary H.K. Choi

I have horrible shoe hang-ups. Particularly when it comes to flats.

Mary H.K. Choi

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

Mary H.K. Choi

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.

Mary H.K. Choi

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.

Mary H.K. Choi

I love my mother a not-normal amount.

Mary H.K. Choi

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

Mary H.K. Choi

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

Mary H.K. Choi

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

Mary H.K. Choi

I am obsessed with Neil Patrick Harris on Twitter.

Mary H.K. Choi

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

Mary H.K. Choi

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.

Mary H.K. Choi

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.

Mary H.K. Choi

I love how British people call Asian people 'oriental' unless they're talking about Indian people, who get to be called Asian.

Mary H.K. Choi

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

Mary H.K. Choi

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

Mary H.K. Choi

I am anti-Halloween.

Mary H.K. Choi

Never post boring back-to-back selfies.

Mary H.K. Choi

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