Katie Kitamura > Quotes

“I thought—I want to go home. I want to be in a place that feels like home. Where that was, I did not know.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it, and the boundary between the two is more porous than you might think, that is both the danger and the excitement of the performance.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnesses, the horrifying image or the voice speaking the unspeakable, in order to exist in the world we must and we do forget, we live in a state of I know but I do not know.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“Interpretation can be profoundly disorienting, you can be so caught up in the minutiae of the act, in trying to maintain utmost fidelity to the words being spoken first by the subject and then by yourself, that you do not necessarily apprehend the sense of the sentences themselves: you literally do not know what you are saying. Language loses its meaning.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“In the end, what is a relationship but two people, and between two people there will always be room for surprises and misapprehensions, things that cannot be explained. Perhaps another way of putting it is that between two people, there will always be room for failures of imagination.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“I no longer believed that equanimity was either tenable or desirable. It corroded everything inside. I had never met a person with greater equanimity than the former president. But this applied to all of them—to the prosecution and the defense, to the judges and even the other interpreters. They were able to work. They had the right temperament for the job. But at what internal cost?”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“How many times are we offered the opportunity to rewrite the past and therefore the future, to reconfigure our present personas - a widow rather than a divorcee, faithful rather faithless? The past is subject to all kinds of revision, it is hardly a stable field, and every alteration in the past dictates an alteration in the future. Even a change in our conception of the past can result in a different future, different to the one we planned.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“I could understand anything, under the right circumstances and for the right person. It was both a strength and a weakness.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“People always talked about having children as an event, as a thing that took place, they forgot that not having children was also something that took place, that is to say it wasn’t a question of absence, a question of lack, it had its own presence in the world, it was its own event.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“People were capable of living their lives in a state of permanent disappointment, there were plenty of people who did not marry the person they hoped to marry, much less live the life they hoped to live, other people invented new dreams to replace the old ones, finding fresh reasons for discontent.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“Contrary to popular belief, charisma was not inherent but had constantly to be reinforced.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“But none of us are able to really see the world we are living in—this world, occupying as it does the contradiction between its banality (the squat wall of the Detention Center, the bus running along its ordinary route) and its extremity (the cell and the man inside the cell), is something that we see only briefly and then do not see again for a long time, if ever. It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed, the horrifying image or the voice speaking the unspeakable, in order to exist in the world we must and we do forget, we live in a state of I know but I do not know.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“But a narrative becomes persuasive not through complexity but conviction,”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“And although there were things I had intended to say to him, words that had passed through by head many times, words that I had beloved needed to be spoken between us, I said only this: I understand. I could understand anything, under the right circumstances and for the tight person. I was both a strength and a weakness.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“I turned back to the canvas, and it occurred to me then that only a woman could have made this image. This was not a painting of temptation, but rather one of harassment and intimidation, a scene that could be taking place right now in nearly anyplace in the world. The painting operated around a schism, it represented two irreconcilable subjective positions: the man, who believed the scene to be one of ardor and seduction, and the woman, who had been plunged into a state of fear and humiliation. That schism, I now realized, was the true inconsistency animating the canvas, and the true object of Leyster's gaze.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“Because in fact we don’t want to see the thing itself, on a screen or on a stage, we don’t want to see actual pain or suffering or death, but its representation. Our awareness of the performance is what allows us to enjoy the emotion, to creep close to it and breathe in its atmosphere, performance allows this dangerous proximity.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“I had lived with my slow-moving grief for so long that I had ceased to notice it, or recognize how it blunted my feeling.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“. I thought that was why, as I stood before a painting of a young girl in half-light, there was something that was both guarded and vulnerable in her gaze. It was not the contradiction of a single instant, but rather it was as if the painter had caught her in two separate states of emotion, two different moods, and managed to contain them within the single image. There would have been a multitude of such instants captured in the canvas, between the time she first sat down before the painter and the time she rose, neck and upper body stiff, from the final sitting. That layering—in effect a kind of temporal blurring, or simultaneity—was perhaps ultimately what distinguished painting from photography. I wondered if that was the reason why contemporary painting seemed to me so much flatter, to lack the mysterious depth of these works, because so many painters now worked from photographs.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“This was done for obvious reasons, there were great chasms beneath words, between two or sometimes more languages, that could open up without warning.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“I knew that what Tomas—what the waiter, and the middle-aged couple sitting at the nearby table, what they had all been misled by was the current of intensity running between Xavier and me. Its source was an imbalance of want. Two people who want the same thing will never generate the same intensity as two people who want different things, or one person who wants into an absence, a void—as was in fact the case with Xavier, who wanted something from me that I could not give. More than that—he wanted something that I could not begin to fathom, a desire with which it felt dangerous to collude or to involve myself.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“Didn't I know, he asked, that some people found me a snob? I didn't. Our marriage was formed by the things Christopher knew and the things I did not. This was not simply a question of intellect, although in that respect Christopher again had the advantage, he was without a doubt a clever man. It was a question of things withheld, information that he had, and that I did not. In short, it was a question of infidelities - betrayal always puts one partner in the position of knowing, and leaves the other in the dark.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“In the end, it took only a decade to become of a place, and that was not so very long.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“I looked around again, nothing had changed in the apartment, with the exception of the volume I had purchased at Anton de Rijk’s shop in the Old Town. I had been complicit in my own erasure.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“Perhaps they were involved in something illicit, or something that newly appeared so to them—the way we understood our own behavior shifted according to whether or not we thought we were being seen.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“From a moral perspective, the man was guilty; from a legal perspective, the man was likely innocent. That both those things were possible was of course understood.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“More and more often, I was surprised by the person in the mirror, it was not the lines at my mouth or the hollowness around my eyes, it was the lag in recognition that was the most troubling, the brief moment when I looked in the mirror and did not know who I was.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“I saw the details of the landscape in high and sometimes startling relief - because the place was not yet worn down by acquaintance or distorted by memory, and because I had begun looking for something, although I didn't know exactly what.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“A place has a curious quality when you have only a partial understanding of its language, and in those early months the sensation was especially peculiar. At first I moved in a cloud of unknowing, the speech around me impenetrable, but it quickly grew less elusive as I began to understand single words and then phrases and now even snippets of conversation. On occasion, I found myself stumbling into situations more intimate than I would have liked, the city was no longer the innocent place it had been when I arrived.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“Two people who want the same thing will never generate the same intensity as two people who want different things, or one person who wants into an absence, a void--...”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“I looked across at Tomas and I knew he was not convinced, that some part of him wished to stay inside the performance, inside the fantasy, I could see the thought moving through his head and nearly settling, what was a family if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition