Katie Kitamura QUOTES

1 " It was a terrible thing, to love and not know whether you were loved in return, it led to the worst sensations--jealousy, rage, self-loathing--to all these lesser states. "

― Katie Kitamura , A Separation

2 " Prior to my arrival, when I had applied for and then was offered the position, the Court had existed in my mind as a near medieval institution, in the manner of the Binnenhof, the Parliament complex only a couple miles away in the center of the city. Even after I arrived and for the first month of my employment, I had been startled every time I encountered the building. I knew very well that the Court was a recent invention, having been founded only a decade earlier, but the modern architecture still seemed incongruous, perhaps even lacking the authority I had expected.
Six months later, it was merely the place of my employment: everything grows normal after a time. "

― Katie Kitamura , Intimacies

3 " I did not know whether I wished to stay or not. But where would I go, if I were to leave? I was not yet able to envision an alternative. For this reason alone it was not a matter of small interest to me, whether or not the Court would extend my contract. "

― Katie Kitamura , Intimacies

4 " I like the Dutch, they are quite neutral as a people, although even that is in and of itself something to adjust to. "

― Katie Kitamura

5 " 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

6 " I realized, belatedly, that she had likely applied the makeup for Adriaan’s sake; certainly she had not done so for mine. I wondered then what it was like to be a man, so often surrounded by such deliberate features, more vivid than actual nature. "

― Katie Kitamura , Intimacies

7 " 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

8 " Ever since the witness testimony, my time in the booth had become more difficult, and I had started to look at my colleagues differently. They no longer seemed like the well-adjusted individuals I had met upon my arrival, instead they were marked by alarming fissures, levels of dissociation that I did not think could be sustainable. "

― Katie Kitamura , Intimacies

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " 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

13 " 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

14 " 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

15 " 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

16 " 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

17 " Contrary to popular belief, charisma was not inherent but had constantly to be reinforced. "

― Katie Kitamura , Intimacies

18 " 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

19 " A tourist - almost by definition a person immersed in prejudice, whose interest was circumscribed, who admired the weathered faced and rustic manners of the local inhabitants, a perspective entirely contemptible but nonetheless difficult to avoid. I would have irritated myself in their position. By my presence alone, I reduced their home to a backdrop for my leisure, it became picturesque, quaint, charming, words on the back of a postcard or a brochure. Perhaps, as a tourist, I even congratulated myself on my taste, my ability to perceive this charm, certainly Christopher would have done so, it was not Monaco, it was not Saint-Tropez, this delightful rural village was something more sophisticated, something unexpected. "

― Katie Kitamura , A Separation

20 " In the end, it took only a decade to become of a place, and that was not so very long. "

― Katie Kitamura , Intimacies

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