Alexandra Kleeman > Quotes

“Loving someone was no guarantee of how they would treat you. All it did was raise the stakes.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“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, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“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, Intimations: Darkly Humorous and Thought-Provoking Short Stories – Surreal Literary Fiction

“People were such fragile things: they only existed from a certain angle, at a certain scale and spacing.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“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, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“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, Intimations: Darkly Humorous and Thought-Provoking Short Stories – Surreal Literary Fiction

“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, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“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, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“I found the brightness of the outdoors, rectangled through large glass panels.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“It all smelled like beauty products, that anonymous female scent that we rub onto ourselves to blend into a wet, aggregate femininity, to smell like a person but not like any person in particular.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“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, Intimations: Darkly Humorous and Thought-Provoking Short Stories – Surreal Literary Fiction

“Why can't you just let people have their own inner lives, as long as they're doing pretty much what they're supposed to with their outer lives?”
― Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“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, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“A woman’s body never really belongs to herself. As an infant, my body was my mother’s, a detachable extension of her own, a digestive passage clamped and unclamped from her body. My parents would watch over it, watch over what went in and out of it, and as I grew up I would be expected to carry on their watching by myself. Then there was sex, and a succession of years in which I trawled my body along behind me like a drift net, hoping that I wouldn’t catch anything in it by accident, like a baby or a disease. I had kept myself free of these things only through clumsy accident and luck. At rare and specific moments when my body was truly my own, I never knew what to do with it.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“Why was the only choice paper or plastic, rathern than being able to choose to buy nothing at all?”
― Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun

“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, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“Maybe that was the secret to happiness, I thought, being free of the responsibility of yourself.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“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, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“Scientists have confirmed that chemicals are present in nearly everything manufactured by natural or artificial means.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“I find it increasingly difficult to speak of my feelings at will.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, Intimations: Darkly Humorous and Thought-Provoking Short Stories – Surreal Literary Fiction

“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, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“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, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“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, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“The lobsters were dead in a pile and no longer a danger to us… We ate them to destroy them but a murmuring came, nevertheless, from their empty carapaces un-cracked, the lobsters with their soft hissing voices, and their words like air escaping a punctured tire. We ate them to destroy them all but suddenly we felt sad and empty and overly full.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, Intimations: Darkly Humorous and Thought-Provoking Short Stories – Surreal Literary Fiction

“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, Intimations: Darkly Humorous and Thought-Provoking Short Stories – Surreal Literary Fiction

“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, Intimations: Darkly Humorous and Thought-Provoking Short Stories – Surreal Literary Fiction

“Wanting things was a substitute for wanting people, one of the best possible substitutes.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“I heard stories about her, mostly stories about her biting people.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“My fiancé immediately began to look uncomfortable, but did not voice this discomfort except by a soft gurgling sound in the throat . . . The gurgling escalated, but my mother politely switched on the dishwasher, and soon we heard mostly the sound of machinery rather than that of a person's feelings surfacing.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, Intimations: Darkly Humorous and Thought-Provoking Short Stories – Surreal Literary Fiction

“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, Intimations: Darkly Humorous and Thought-Provoking Short Stories – Surreal Literary Fiction