Alexandra Kleeman Quotes

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

Alexandra Kleeman

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. I did have a friend,' I said.

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

Alexandra Kleeman

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

Alexandra Kleeman

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

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

Alexandra Kleeman

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. Scientists have confirmed that chemicals are present in nearly everything manufactured by natural or artificial means.

Alexandra Kleeman

#14. 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

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

Alexandra Kleeman

#16. 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

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

Alexandra Kleeman

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. The only air that moves is air we push from our lungs.

Alexandra Kleeman

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

Alexandra Kleeman

#26. 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

#27. 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

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

Alexandra Kleeman

#29. Loving someone was no guarantee of how they would treat you. All it did was raise the stakes.

Alexandra Kleeman

#30. Maybe that was the secret to happiness, I thought, being free of the responsibility of yourself.

Alexandra Kleeman

#31. 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

#32. People were such fragile things: they only existed from a certain angle, at a certain scale and spacing.

Alexandra Kleeman

#33. I found the brightness of the outdoors, rectangled through large glass panels.

Alexandra Kleeman

#34. 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

#35. I find it increasingly difficult to speak of my feelings at will.

Alexandra Kleeman

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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