Intimacies 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

“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

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

“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

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

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

“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

“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

“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 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

“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

“. 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

“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

“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

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

“Interpretation was a matter of great subtlety, a word with many contexts, for example it is often said that an actor interprets a role, or a musician a piece of music.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“My job is to make the space between languages as small as possible.”
― 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

“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

“The Court was run according to the suspension of disbelief: every person in the courtroom knew but also did not know that there was a great deal of artifice surrounding matters that were nonetheless predicated on authenticity.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“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

“I had made myself too easy to leave, stashed away like a spare part, I had asked for too little, and now it was too late.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“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

“The appearance of simplicity is not the same as simplicity itself.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“I see." But I saw that he did not see, or, that he was not certain of what the words meant.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“You know, she's quite alone here." Words that somehow made me feel as if I did not belong in this city, this country, or even this room.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“For several days, there were a great many journalists at the Court... We regarded them with both suspicions and awe, they possessed the ability to direct attention to a particular event, person, or place with the press of a button, and they were not using that power to direct the world's gaze on the Court... They had mere fragments of the narrative, and yet they would assemble those fragments into a story like any other story, a story with the appearance of unity.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“I asked how old her children were and she said, Ten and twelve. It's gone quickly, their childhood, but it's also gone very slowly. When they are young, it is exhausting and you have no time for yourself, but you can still make them happy. That's no longer the case with my boys. They're old enough to understand things, they see the world as it is. They are wiser but they are also more vulnerable.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies