The Details Quotes

“We live so many lives within our lives – smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children who grow up – and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame.”
― Ia Genberg, The Details

“That's all there is to the self, or the so-called 'self': traces of the people we rub up against. I loved Joanna's words and gestures and let them become part of me, intentionally or not. I suppose that is at the core of every relationship and the reason that in some sense no relationship ever ends.”
― Ia Genberg, Detaljerna

“Some books stay in your bones long after their titles and details have slipped from memory.”
― Ia Genberg, The Details

“When I was younger, I often thought I should travel more and farther, spend more time in foreign countries, that I should be in a constant state of velocity so that I could get out of there and truly live, but with time I have come to understand that everything I was looking for was right here, inside of me, inside the things that surround me, in the money bobs that turned into my actual jobs, in the constancy of the everyday, in the eyes of the people I meet when I allow my gaze to linger. I'm writing again after the fever, as if an old, welcome wound has opened and started to bleed, and I guess it's an incomplete puzzle, these pictures of others and whoever they end up portraying. . . . 'Soon it will be too late,' [Sally] says, and hands me the thermos. 'And that's why we have to exert ourselves to the utmost.”
― Ia Genberg, Detaljerna

“Anxiety's central task, as instructed by fear, is to run ahead and touch everything, circle potentialities with the intention of preventing them from happening, on and on and on in a process that never stops, that becomes one with life.”
― Ia Genberg, Detaljerna

“The words for "forgiveness" and "freedom" are the same in several languages; an obvious point perhaps, but in this moment I realized that "letting go" could be said in the same breath.”
― Ia Genberg, The Details

“if we're searching we should look in each other”
― Ia Genberg, The Details

“Getting attached, to me they were like tattoos, everything and every detail present and intact, everyone I’d loved and liked was still with me.”
― Ia Genberg, The Details

“Ever since my friendship with Niki I think of the anecdote as a form of chronic illness that attaches itself to some people; that compulsion to tell everything in the shape of a story, to turn life into a formula meant to captivate, impress, upset, or inspire laughter. An anecdote is a sealed box that cannot yield anything other than more sealed boxes until every party to the conversation - or the
"so-called conversation" as Niki would put it - sits there with their own pile of sealed boxes, mentally obstructed, tied to the mast, and with the anecdote next in line tugging at their attention.”
― Ia Genberg, Detaljerna

“I couldn’t choose to hold on to or let go of feelings; instead it would be the feelings that finally gave up and released me”
― Ia Genberg, The Details

“Anxiety's central task, as instructed by fear, is to run ahead and touch everything, circle potentialities with the intention of preventing them from happening, on and on in a process that never stops, that becomes one with life.”
― Ia Genberg, The Details

“Early on in our friendship we'd explored the possibility that we were in love, but those feelings had soon subsided and made space for something much more enduring, a multiyear conversation that went round and round, a true love without claim to ownership, a bracing pact in the face of every new circumstance in our respective lives.”
― Ia Genberg, Detaljerna

“TV means that somebody else is trying to control my gaze, whereas books leave me to my own devices.”
― Ia Genberg, Detaljerna

“I might have given the impression of being dedicated but I was not, and the book stack on my nightstand always included one or two titles I'd abandoned midway through.”
― Ia Genberg, The Details

“So how did our friendship end? With a scolding, of course; it was in the cards from the very beginning. All relationships have the potential to end abruptly, it's an inherent risk, but when I became friends with Niki I knew that the brutal end wasn't just one of the many conceivable scenarios; it was the only possible end. I knew with certainty that no friendship survived her, and nevertheless I was surprised. Like death, I guess.”
― Ia Genberg, The Details

“L'io , o meglio, il cosidetto "io", non è altro che questo: ciò che resta delle persone a cui ci siamo stretti.”
― Ia Genberg, Detaljerna

“To read with a fever is a lottery; the contents of the text will either dissolve or penetrate deep into the cracks accidentally opened by an out-of-control temperature.”
― Ia Genberg, The Details

“I was attracted to it, I inhaled it, I let myself be impregnated by her way of speaking and being. I adapted, made my own version of it, let her change me forever. That's all there is to the self, or the so-called 'self': traces of the people we rub up against.”
― Ia Genberg, The Details

“I preferred books with a pull so strong I couldn't get out. It was the same way with most things in life and as a result, my responsibilities were few, perhaps too few.”
― Ia Genberg, The Details

“I’ve had more than my share of magic in life, most often in the encounter with others. There is something there, and only there. I can’t be more specific than that, can only say that if we’re searching we should look in each other, that a pair of eyes are another’s sideways colon into something, or out of something.”
― Ia Genberg, The Details

“We had the entirety of the twentieth century behind us and an unknown millennium in front of us, an epic split, and still we gave ourselves to small things, corrupt feelings.”
― Ia Genberg, The Details

“Trust, after all, is only a word when you can’t feel it in your body. As soon as trust attaches, as soon as it takes root, it fuses with the rest of what’s there, takes on other names.”
― Ia Genberg, The Details

“Her breathing was so anxious through the end, her anxiety the last to leave the body. But shortly thereafter, when her partner had gone to tell the nurses it was over, I felt her streak past, right by me. Finally you're free of all this, I thought.”
― Ia Genberg, The Details

“Poi però ho capito di avere già tutto a portata di mano, nei dettagli che ci circondano; mi basta guardarli bene, e allora riesco a staccarmi da me stessa e dirigere il mio sguardo altrove, e con "altrove" intendo proprio fuori di me. È là che si trova quello stato vitale più elevato, nel mio sguardo vigile su qualcun altro.”
― Ia Genberg, Detaljerna

“La vita mi ha regalato la mia buona dose di magia, e il più delle volte è successo all'incontro con gli altri. Lì c'è qualcosa. Lì, soltanto lì.”
― Ia Genberg, Detaljerna

“[Brigitte] was never granted peace, there was always some aspect of the world that had to be controlled les things went out of hand. And I suppose that's what's at the heart of it for every person suffering from anxiety; the fact that life, by its very nature, is impossible to manage.”
― Ia Genberg, Detaljerna

“Anyone who met Niki in passing might get the impression that love was easy for her, a switch she could turn on or off, people who came and went, people she loved and stopped loving. It could seem like a simple mechanism with a narrow register: on or off, black or white, love or hate. In reality it was the opposite: she was an ocean of feelings, with more gradients and nuances than she could handle, as if the full cast of Greek gods and all the emotions and states they represented had been crammed in behind her eyelids. There was an intimate racket in there, never ending.”
― Ia Genberg, The Details

“Just like buying books, the ownership of books was distinct from other types of ownership, more like a loan that might run out or be transferred onto someone else at the drop of a hat, for example as soon as anybody showed an interest in the title or author in question.”
― Ia Genberg, The Details

“All relationships have the potential to end abruptly, it’s an inherent risk,”
― Ia Genberg, The Details

“I suppose that’s what a capital city might offer a “fucking unhinged” person in exchange for what she gave us: parties, warmth, chaos, scoldings, a thousand things to irritate us, and the self-knowledge brought by that irritation.”
― Ia Genberg, The Details