Alexandra Kleeman Quotes & Sayings

I turn my head and stare out the casement window at the royal gardens instead, wet and slippery and dark as the center of a body, where the roses twitch an extinguished red. — Alexandra Kleeman

But I had no idea who this person might be, or who any of the people might be who sat at that table and watched me at the door and claimed to have feelings not exactly for me, but at me. — Alexandra Kleeman

Say something to it, he said.

As I looked at the baby, I felt nothing taking shape in mind or mouth. I had no idea what the sort of things were that somebody would say to a baby. I had no idea why anyone would say anything to a baby. I held it carefully, as one would a sack of apples. And then, with him watching me, nodding encouragingly, I began to say to it, for lack of anything else to say, all the words I had ever known, in order. — Alexandra Kleeman

I did have a friend,' I said.

'And your friend trespassed upon you,' the Wally replied. — Alexandra Kleeman

I had seen the few things I cared about forget me seamlessly. I had seen the life I never really fit into heal up around my absence like a wound scabbed over. — Alexandra Kleeman

There was no better way to live, or worse. It was all terrible, and you had to do it constantly, — Alexandra Kleeman

She was truly happy for the first time in her life, and it felt just like living in a small room painted all white, with windows looking out onto impenetrable forest. — Alexandra Kleeman

The only air that moves is air we push from our lungs. — Alexandra Kleeman

I remembered from movies and TV that a human being striking a window could cause it to shatter, but the glass was too strong or I was too weak. My body didn't do much anymore when I put it to things. I didn't even make much noise pounding my fist against the glass: the ones that turned to look dismissed me almost before they had swiveled their heads. I might have been a painting of a hysterical female, paused in motion and screaming decoratively. But my throat was going raw, and my hands hurt dully. — Alexandra Kleeman

It was terrible the way resemblances ran wild through the things of the world, the way one place or time mimicked another, making you feel that you were going in circles, going nowhere at all. I looked forward to becoming my own ghost, which I had been told would resemble nothing and would look uniquely like itself. — Alexandra Kleeman

And as he leaned in to kiss me, my eye saw his open mouth grow larger and larger until it seemed it could swallow me whole. — Alexandra Kleeman

Standing there small among the boxes of Kandy Kakes that rose like brownish cartoon cliffs around him, he resembled the videos I'd seen of sea lions floating angelically among the kelp, black bodies filmed from below, their shapes cut out in bright sunlight, bodies mistakable for those of a human being. I felt the memory of a shadowy arm around me, a watcher again, sitting there on the couch with my boyfriend, watching the animals become prey. Somewhere there were giant whales feeding on creatures too small to see, pressing them against fronds of baleen with a tongue the size of a sedan. There were polar bears killing seals, tearing ovoid chunks from out of their smooth, round bellies. In the surrounding vastness of the warehouse, I heard something scratching against the concrete floor and knew there were rats here, scraping a thin film of nutrient from the dry packaged matter that surrounded them. Life was everywhere, inescapable, imperative. — Alexandra Kleeman

She felt sad, but she hadn't cried all day. She thought that crying would actually be a good thing right now. It seemed normal to react. Whoever Martin had been, he had probably been a normal person. He was probably having a normal reaction right now, and she had caused it. She felt bad for confusing him. She thought it might be fair to cry for him. But it wasn't until she thought of the mother cows in the pasture the day after the weaning, wandering around singly in the naked sunshine, still trying to call out in their hoarse, broken voices for the young ones that were still missing, that she was finally able to make herself cry - a little bit for all of the calves, but mostly for herself. — Alexandra Kleeman

Scientists have confirmed that chemicals are present in nearly everything manufactured by natural or artificial means. — Alexandra Kleeman

To Karen he was worse than a stranger: she knew with certainty that something weird lurked inside him. — Alexandra Kleeman

I found the brightness of the outdoors, rectangled through large glass panels. — Alexandra Kleeman

But there was a feeling building in me now that I hadn't felt since I'd shown up at this stupid party: I was excited. Something was going to happen. Either this would work, or it wouldn't. Either I would be spared, or I would die. Either death was something that could be fooled, outwitted, outplayed, or it was not. However things ended, I would learn something about the world in which, for the moment, I continued to live. — Alexandra Kleeman

I find it increasingly difficult to speak of my feelings at will. — Alexandra Kleeman

Birds looked like an echo of birds, fat white clouds looked as if they were there to sell you fabric softener or air travel or health insurance. — Alexandra Kleeman

It was all collecting inside there, gathering like dust, building, building up, until someday there would be enough for some part to pierce the surface of her silence and gasp out a piece of what lay beneath. — Alexandra Kleeman

He was so far away now, or maybe he just looked distant because we were imaging different things for our future. — Alexandra Kleeman

There had been times when I thought I might be with you indefinitely, something approaching an entire life. But then when there was only a finite amount of time, a thing we could both see the limit of, I wasn't so sure. — Alexandra Kleeman

Maybe that was the secret to happiness, I thought, being free of the responsibility of yourself. — Alexandra Kleeman

Though it had been over a year, she staggered through the world like one freshly bludgeoned by love. — Alexandra Kleeman

There was nothing else I could do but say sorry myself. His apology had left a residue in me, a residue on my thinking, and continuing on in this house without saying it would be entirely awkward. It would turn the small space toxic. So I said it, though I tried to lessen the potency of the apology by mumbling. — Alexandra Kleeman

So full. Full of lobster meat and the sadness of the lobster meat. Full of the feeling of having cracked hundreds upon hundreds of precious shells. Full of the sound and the sight of destruction, the lobsters dead in a pile, some of them with lipstick marks on their empty husks. Their voices piled up on one another. I felt a whispering coming from deep within my belly, the voices not yet at rest, and they said in a tone sympathetic and unsympathetic at the same time, Next Next Next. 'Well,' I said, 'what do we do next?' 'Lobster dinner?' he asked, chuckling a little as if I ought to be chuckling with him as well. — Alexandra Kleeman

The sun weighs on them from overhead, weighs like light upon them all, as they tilt their faces up toward the source, mouths open, joyful, and light touches the backs of their mouths, the unbroken backs of their throats. — Alexandra Kleeman

In the advertisement, anonymous hands wielded shiny shiny blades that chopped through butter and animal bone as if they were the same thing, through ice and tendon and untreated wood as if there was no difference between anything in the world - only a slight variation in grain, visible once something has been split in half. — Alexandra Kleeman

Inside a body there is no light. A massed wetness pressing in on itself, shapes thrust against each other with no sense of where they are. They break in the crowding, come unmade. You put your hand to your stomach and press into the softness, trying to listen with your fingers for what's gone wrong. Anything could be inside. It's no surprise, then, that we care most for our surfaces: they alone distinguish us from one another and are so fragile, the thickness of paper. — Alexandra Kleeman

I was worried that there'd be emotional spillage, maybe even some tears, and comforting strangers always made me feel like a pervert. — Alexandra Kleeman

But since C had disappeared, the fantasies that obsessed me were all the worst things I could imagine at any given time. — Alexandra Kleeman

I missed you more now than I had when I lost you. I was forgetting the bad things faster than I forgot the good, and the changing ratio felt a little bit like falling in love even though I was actually speaking to you less and less. — Alexandra Kleeman

This feeling of lessening disturbance, coming from within myself, unexpected, was profoundly disturbing. As I sat still, growing less and less alarmed by the situation, I knew that I had to move fast, as fast and as far as I could within this small, cramped house. — Alexandra Kleeman

I didn't know what to say. I knew I had a big choice to make. I could let it all go and try to love him, try to trust him, try to make something lasting and good. He obviously had strong feelings for me or about me. And he wasn't being so bad right now. We could build something sturdy, beautiful. Or I could try to make a dash for the door by crawling under the dining room table.

There was a good chance that he would kill me later either way. — Alexandra Kleeman

Right now I felt like a person learning that a surgeon had left a pair of scissors inside her during a operation. — Alexandra Kleeman

You have beautiful eyes, he said all of a sudden.

I hated compliments like that, compliments that carved out one particular part of your body and put it on a platter for viewing. It always took a while for me to reabsorb that body part afterward, to add it back to the whole. The best kind of compliment to give me was something vague, plausible. You're all right. Or, Don't worry, it gets better. — Alexandra Kleeman

Loving someone was no guarantee of how they would treat you. All it did was raise the stakes. — Alexandra Kleeman

Outside the window there was snow falling, falling like movie snow, all the dreamy fluffy bits drifting around in the light of a single streetlamp . . . I watched the snow slow down, thin out. Then it was two or three pieces at a time, falling reversibly, wavering up and down and up again like they didn't know where to go. — Alexandra Kleeman

Sometimes a face could be so simple: even a couple of dark spots on a lighter surface or a dark oval in the distance might be a face. An electrical socket could be a face, a mailbox or a couple of punctuation marks could congeal suddenly into something with an expression. Our faces, on the other hand, were made of hundreds of different parts, each part separate and tenuous and capable of being ugly, each part waiting for a product designed to isolate and act upon it. — Alexandra Kleeman

I left the room before I could figure out exactly what bothered me about his response. Was it the way it seemed to assume a future for the two of us? A future in which I would continue to be unable to leave this house? Was it the presumption that I was making a cake for him when, really, I had no idea why I was making a cake at all? — Alexandra Kleeman

There are times when any amount of being within the world is like rubbing bare skin against sandpaper, when any form of motion is a kind of abrasion, leaving you raw and pink and vulnerable to the next thing. At these times I prefer to close my eyes and be still, still like the cups or candles or crackers on the table, nerveless and open. I closed my eyes and tried to think of the thing furthest from my situation. — Alexandra Kleeman

The structural similarity of men, and their ability to be represented both as ideal, like Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, and as average. Man being the measure of all things, and therefore a sort of standard and interchangeable unit of length, breadth, intelligence, emotion. We could lay them end to end to measure the distance between the continents, the distance to the moon. We could use them to calculate the weight of weather, or to buy things at the grocery. With such an abundance of men, we could gauge anything we chose. — Alexandra Kleeman

Tell me, is there someone in your life who's been sharing your life too closely? A friend or a loved one? Is there someone who's been taking up your time and not giving any of it back? — Alexandra Kleeman

It seemed as though, being the only two people in this small, closed-in space, we couldn't help but have a relationship, and if we couldn't help but have a relationship, I felt that it was important to be upset now so that he would not shift the blame to me in the future. — Alexandra Kleeman

You needed a vision of the future in order to get anywhere; you couldn't live life thinking you were always about to fall off a cliff. — Alexandra Kleeman

Karen couldn't understand how these encounters had marked him, and she had always believed that a person without trauma was dangerous in some way, untested. Also bizarre: in all of his stories, Dan ended up succeeding. — Alexandra Kleeman

But when I reached for the knob, it wouldn't turn. The lock was on the outside. Who ever heard of the lock for a door being on the outside? It would be up to another, possibly a total and complete stranger, to decide whether you'd ever be allowed to leave. — Alexandra Kleeman

He must have a lover of his own, some man or woman or animal whose absence hurt like a presence, some person that he poured himself into like a mold to remind himself of what he was. — Alexandra Kleeman

There was a hazy damp film in his eyes that I recognized from emotions in old movies, projected large on darkened screens. — Alexandra Kleeman

People were such fragile things: they only existed from a certain angle, at a certain scale and spacing. — Alexandra Kleeman

She said that everything that disappeared from our side went over to theirs, where they kept living normal lives, waiting for the things still lingering with us to join them, and make the world whole once more. — Alexandra Kleeman

This is about how you relate to the world,' C said.

'Maybe it's about how the world relates to me,' I said back. — Alexandra Kleeman

There's a kind of pressure that your own life muscles onto you, to do something just like you would do, to behave just like yourself. — Alexandra Kleeman

The past was just a place where uncontrolled freaks you had never consciously decided to include in your life entered it anyway and staggered around, breaking things. — Alexandra Kleeman

I got up to go back to the kitchen and put the cake in the oven. Probably it would not go well for the cake, or for whoever tried to eat the cake. It did not look as though the cake was going to turn out particularly nice, having been made for confusing reasons and lacking certain essential ingredients. But what else was there to do? Wasn't a terrible cake better than some terrible cake batter? — Alexandra Kleeman

Outside the windows, everything is getting darker. First the yellow dies from the light, then the green and pink. The world is a blue version of itself, momentarily, before the blue snuffs out, too and it is all night. — Alexandra Kleeman

I was so tired. I just wanted to curl up with someone, anyone, even him, and sleep until work on Monday. I wanted to feel someone's, anyone's, hands on me, even if it was in that way I hate, the fingers all over my face and jaw. — Alexandra Kleeman

These masked men were going to bring me to a cleaner place, where things were more sharply distinguished from one another and where I would finally have the space to figure out who I was without other people nudging me all the time into shapes they thought I should have. — Alexandra Kleeman