Home > Author > Alexandra Kleeman
41 " 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
42 " 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. "
43 " The only air that moves is air we push from our lungs. "
44 " 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. "
45 " 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
46 " It was terrible the way resemblances ran wild through the things of the world, the way one place or time mimicked another, making you feel that you were going in circles, going nowhere at all. I looked forward to becoming my own ghost, which I had been told would resemble nothing and would look uniquely like itself. "
47 " 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. "
48 " In the advertisement, anonymous hands wielded shiny shiny blades that chopped through butter and animal bone as if they were the same thing, through ice and tendon and untreated wood as if there was no difference between anything in the world—only a slight variation in grain, visible once something has been split in half. "
49 " I remembered from movies and TV that a human being striking a window could cause it to shatter, but the glass was too strong or I was too weak. My body didn't do much anymore when I put it to things. I didn't even make much noise pounding my fist against the glass: the ones that turned to look dismissed me almost before they had swiveled their heads. I might have been a painting of a hysterical female, paused in motion and screaming decoratively. But my throat was going raw, and my hands hurt dully. "
50 " Loving someone was no guarantee of how they would treat you. All it did was raise the stakes. "
51 " People were such fragile things: they only existed from a certain angle, at a certain scale and spacing. "
52 " 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. "
53 " I found the brightness of the outdoors, rectangled through large glass panels. "
54 " I was worried that there’d be emotional spillage, maybe even some tears, and comforting strangers always made me feel like a pervert. "
55 " 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. "
56 " Scientists have confirmed that chemicals are present in nearly everything manufactured by natural or artificial means. "
57 " 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. "
58 " 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. "
59 " 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
60 " 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? "