Katherine Min > Quotes

“It’s a secondhand world we’re born into. What is novel to us is only so because we’re newborn, and what we cannot see, that has come before- what our parents have seen and been and done- are the hand-me-downs we begin to wear as swaddling clothes, even as we ourselves are naked. The flaw runs through us, implicating us in its imperfection even as it separates us, delivers us onto opposite sides of a chasm. It is both terribly beautiful and terribly sad, but it is, finally, the fault in the universe that gives birth to us all.”
― Katherine Min, Secondhand World

“Eyes that looked out into the world, that took in so cleverly light, shape, and movement--why should it be important what they themselves looked like? The thing is that it was. Not what we see, but how we are seen.”
― Katherine Min, Secondhand World

“When someone dies, our impulse is to flatten her out, to press her between wax paper like a leaf, or to fix her in amber like a bug. Death as capture, death as collected works. But death is a false terminus, one moment only. It seems more significant because it is the last moment, the most recent, when really it is the smallest and least telling. Life is the plumpness of all directions, of surprises and contradictions, of impulses, mistakes, duplicities, and redemptions. While the vanishing point on the horizon line is a dot, a blip, the same for us all.”
― Katherine Min, The Fetishist

“You could record a performance, as they were going to do in Rome at the end of the tour, but you could never reproduce the currency of the moment in which a performance pulsed and breathed. This was divine, the closest Alma had come, beyond even sex, which was more an emptying out than a pouring in, a draining of self rather than a merging.”
― Katherine Min, The Fetishist

“America is a country without death. Everything is shiny and new to make you forget such a thing exists.”
― Katherine Min

“It’s the creative life force in the moment that makes the work endure.” She pursed her lips. “All this thinking about posterity—it’s so typically male, don’t you think?—this preoccupation with end product, with legacy? What is history anyway but a bunch of penises on parade?”
― Katherine Min, The Fetishist

“I am so happy Mom’s beautiful novel is being published; I am so sad she’s not here to see it happen. I’m happy The Fetishist’s publication process is helping me grow as a writer and person; I’m sad Mom’s death is the reason I’m playing this role. I suppose I no longer conceptualize joy and sorrow as opposites, because everything related to The Fetishist’s publication makes me feel flooded with both at once.”
― Katherine Min, The Fetishist

“Little things are starting to come back to him, memories involving that summer that he can recall with fondness—fondness, and wonder—the way you can look back at a time in your life and say with certainty, "Here, I was most alive.”
― Katherine Min, The Fetishist

“There was a certain way that straight guys tried to play it with gay guys, simultaneously indicating that they didn’t care if you were gay and making it clear that they weren’t. Only, of course, what they were really signaling was that you had been removed from the list of penis-bearers, with whom they competed for all the great prizes, the women, and the glory, forever hallelujah. It disappointed Rickey that Alma had fallen for this guy, but then he was always being disappointed by straight men. It was a habit he’d acquired young.”
― Katherine Min, The Fetishist

“For it is thrilling to be aligned with the victor, to be held up like a prize, exalted and desired, while the weak are left to gesture in the dirt.”
― Katherine Min, The Fetishist