Words matter. These are the best Alexandra Kleeman Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
These days, there are times when my academic thinking intervenes in my writing, but it’s usually while I’m developing a project and not while I’m writing it.
Sometimes you go for weeks without writing successfully, and you don’t feel like a writer anymore. When friends ask me how my week was or how I’m doing, I think back on it, and I’ve just been by myself. Like, I’m just a sketch.
Remembering who I am is a really active task for me. And I often have to tell myself, ‘You’re a graduate student,’ ‘You’re a daughter,’ et cetera, in situations where I’m supposed to behave like one.
I feel like women bond with other women in this nonverbal way, where they take on each other’s gestures. You start dressing more like each other, you eat the same food… It’s a way of expressing regard: I want to be like you. Which is flattering, but if you view it another way, terrifying.
I’m really interested in passivity as a type of action – sort of allowing the situation to change you, choosing to give in being an act of agency rather than an act of submission.
Makeup is something that a female has to reckon with every single day. Whether you wear it or don’t, you’re always making decisions about wearing it or not, or how you’re wearing it, and what that means.
I feel like things are weirder in our food production chain than I can even make up. I wouldn’t invent pink slime, but pink slime exists: It’s a non-fictional entity. Like, that stuff grosses me out so much, I couldn’t make it up.
You have to find some way of engaging with the world around you, however it’s constituted. The engagement is necessarily going to be flawed. But if you do it on your own terms, you’ll be able to extract some pleasure from the world. It might even make you really happy sometimes.
I don’t really buy the death-drive thing too literally; it feels overly neat and convenient. But I am suspicious of fighting back being the dominant model for cinematic conflict and personal conflict and political conflict.
As a culture, we really like our food passive.
A lot of the surreal writing that I love is really dreamlike. Like Murakami. He uses the real world, and it’s pretty recognizable, but its populated by these strange visitors, or it has these underground spaces. I was always really compelled by that.
Both my parents are professors, and I never really saw people do any other jobs, so I didn’t really know how to want a different kind of job.
‘I’ is the word everyone uses to refer to themselves. On the one hand, it points to a specific person, but it’s also this blank space that you can insert yourself into; it’s a chute into empathy.
I think I may be the most well-adjusted person you’d ever meet who thinks constantly about falling out of her life. And my life is pretty great! It’s not like I don’t know that.
We’re living at this funny time, where we’re all urged to express ourselves as unique individuals, but on the other hand, we share a limited set of tools for doing that. It’s easy to feel like nothing more than the sum of your consumer choices.
You can feel how much money goes into commercials by how swiftly they act on your mind. And they’ve got, like, a hypnotic quality to the way they present their products.
I went into academia thinking that there’d be constant reciprocity between my scholarship and my creative work but found that doing one always turned my mind into the sort of tool that was badly suited to doing the other.
When I started binge-watching TV, when that became a thing due to Netflix a few years ago, the first thing I watched was ‘Lost.’ It was summer break from grad school, and I watched it all in a row, like as many hours a day as I could, as though I were clocking in at a job.
