Alexandra Kleeman Quotes

“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: Stories

“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: Stories

“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: Stories

“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

“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: Stories

“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: Stories

“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, Intimations: Stories

“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: Stories

“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, Intimations: Stories

“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, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“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, Intimations: Stories

“To Karen he was worse than a stranger: she knew with certainty that something weird lurked inside him.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“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, Intimations: Stories

“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, Intimations: Stories

“Though it had been over a year, she staggered through the world like one freshly bludgeoned by love.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, Intimations: Stories

“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, Intimations: Stories

“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, Intimations: Stories

“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, Intimations: Stories

“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, Intimations: Stories

“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, Intimations: Stories

“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, Intimations: Stories

“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, Intimations: Stories

“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, Intimations: Stories

“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, Intimations: Stories

“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, Intimations: Stories

“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, Intimations: Stories

“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, Intimations: Stories

“The only air that moves is air we push from our lungs.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, Intimations: Stories

“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, Intimations: Stories

“Now we were standing around holding hands and not much was going on. I began to think of words I had known, just for fun, to fill up the blank space in my head. Couch, I thought. Cuisinart, I thought.

The words felt different right now than they had before. They meant a little less, held a little less, but seemed somehow fuller: I had never really noticed how much sound there was in a word. The way it filled your mouth up with emptiness, a sort of loosened emptiness that you could tongue, an emptiness you could suck on like a stone. Stomach, I thought. Variety, I thought. Expectation. Intimation. Infiltration. Infiltration: I tongued that one further. I knew it had a hostile aspect, like someone breaking into your house or posing as someone you should trust. But it also had a lovely sound, a kind of tapered point and a gently ruffled edge, and as I repeated it over and over in my mouth it took on a really great flavor and I thought of water filtering in and out of a piece of fabric, back and forth, moving between, soaking it and washing out, soaking in and taking with it pale tremors of color, memory, resistance, all that stuff, until I felt like one of those pieces of cloth on the television commercials that got washed with the name-brand cleanser and is now not only white, but silky and mountain-scented.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, Intimations: Stories