A Separation Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“life rarely finds its exact likeness in a novel, that is hardly fiction’s purpose,”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“Yes, it is the most important love, the love of the mother is a given, it is taken for granted. A child is born and for the rest of his or her life the mother will love the child, without the child doing anything in particular to earn it. But the love of a wife has to be earned, to be won in the first place and then kept.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“As she observed him, she briefly frowned, it was one of the quandaries a woman sometimes faces, not just a woman, but all of us: she entrances one man without effort, a man who is undesired, who follows her around like a dog, however much he is whipped or abused, while all her efforts to attract and then ensnare another man, the truly desired man, come to naught. Charm is not universal, desire is too often unreciprocated, it gathers and pools in the wrong places, slowly becoming toxic.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“This was the process by which two lives were disentangled, eventually the dread and discomfort would fade and be replaced by unbroken indifference, I would see him in the street by chance, and it would be like seeing an old photograph of yourself: you recognize the image but are unable to remember quite what it was to be that person.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“Every romance requires a backdrop and an audience, even - or perhaps especially - the genuine ones, romance is not something that a couple can be expected to conjure by themselves, you and another, the two of you together, not jut once but again and again, love in general is fortified by its context, nourished by the gaze of others.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“Of course it had been in the air - as the endgame, the worst-case scenario, an inevitability or relief. The word was weighted, ca me pese, a condition of adulthood. In childhood, words are weightless - I shout I hate you and it means nothing, the same can be said for I love you - but as an adult, those very words are used with greater care, they no longer slip out of the mouth with the same ease. I do is another example, a phrase that in childhood is only the stuff of playacting, a game between children, but then grows freighted with meaning.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“Imagination, after all, costs nothing, it's the living that is the harder part.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“Isabella’s tone was imperious, as if grief were a service industry like any other, her experience of grief was failing to meet her standards, she would like to speak to the management.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“had been looking the wrong way, the death she had been watching for had come from behind.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“Charm is not universal, desire is too often unreciprocated, it gathers and pools in the wrong places, slowly becoming toxic.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“Literally an out-of-body experience, he had said. You, the bereaved are completely liberated from the need to emote. All the pressures of the funeral, the expectation that you will perform your grief for the assembled crowd - imagine that you are a widow, burying your husband, people expect a good show. But the nature of grief is incompatible with this demand, people say that when you are grieving, when you have experienced a profound loss, you are impaled beneath it, hardly in a condition to express your sorrow. Instead, you purchase an instrument to express your sorrow, or perhaps it's less like an instrument and more like a tape recorder and tape, you simply press play and the ceremony, the long and elaborate production, carries on without you. You walk away and are left alone with your grief. It is a remarkably enlightened arrangement, of course the financial aspect is crucial, the fact that it is a monetary transaction makes the entire arrangement clean, refined. It's no wonder that such a custom is native to Greece, the so-called cradle of civilization - it makes perfect sense.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“Literally an out-of-body experience, he had said. You, the bereaved are completely liberated from the need to emote. All the pressures of the funeral, the expectation that you will perform your grief for the assembled crowd - imagine that you are a widow, burying your husband, people expect a good show. But the nature of grief is incompatible with this demand”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“If Isabella knew that she had purchased a plane ticket in order for me to ask her son for a divorce, I suppose she would have killed me, actually slain me then and there. Such a thing was not impossible. She was, as I have said, a supremely capable woman.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“It began with a telephone call from Isabella.

And although I could have said, For what?—after all, wasn’t I here, in his home, in his bed, and weren’t we engaged—I knew exactly what he meant, and I could only say that I was sorry, and that I agreed—although what we were waiting for, what exactly it was, neither of us could say.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“What happened now was private to himself—as there are apartments in our own minds that we never enter without apology, we should respect the seals of others—and what was more private than one’s death, particularly when it was violent or unnatural? Wasn’t that why photographs of bodies torn from crime scenes and car accidents struck us as so tasteless, why we despised ourselves when we could not help but rubberneck at a car accident, the feet (still shod) sticking out from under the blue tarp? It wasn’t simply the horror of the dead body, it was the invasion of a stranger’s privacy, the act of seeing what should not be seen.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“Still, they were clearly at ease in front of the camera. They behaved as if they were professionals, that was a function of the age we lived in, people took photographs of themselves all day long, in every act and situation, eating their breakfast, sitting on the train, standing in front of the mirror. The effect was not a new candidness or verisimilitude to the photographs that proliferated—on our phones, computers, on the Internet—but rather the opposite: the artifice of photography had infiltrated our daily lives. We pose all the time, even when we are not being photographed at all.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“But he looked suddenly embarrassed, as if the words had slipped out by accident, he knew that he had broken a code, the tacit understanding that underscores our social interactions, whereby we pretend we do not know what we in fact do know.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“A tourist—almost by definition a person immersed in prejudice, whose interest was circumscribed, who admired the weathered faces 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.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“The word was weighted, ça me pèse, a condition of adulthood. In childhood, words are weightless—I shout I hate you and it means nothing, the same can be said for I love you—but as an adult, those very words are used with greater care, they no longer slip out of the mouth with the same ease. I do is another example, a phrase that in childhood is only the stuff of playacting, a game between children, but then grows freighted with meaning.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“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

“I returned to the waiting area. For the first time, I was conscious of being widowed, of lacking the prosecution of a man, it was an entirely atavistic sensation. Here in the lobby of this police station in Greece, I suddenly felt extraneous to the workings of the world, which is to say the world of men, I had grown invisible, standing at the threshold of that door.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“There was something terrible about falsely accusing a man of murder, even in the imagination. It was an act of speculation that contaminated everything, once seeded, doubt is almost impossible to dispel, I knew that already from my relationship with Christopher, the marriage had died at the hand of my imagination. Still, I could not help myself.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“When I finally did sit down in front of the machine - a familiar object, I had seen it daily when we were living together - I was reminded of how abrupt and unnatural death always is, at least as we experience it: always an interruption, always things that are left unfinished. This was manifested in Christopher's laptop, the desktop was covered in an intricate mosaic of files and document, there were at least a hundred different and sometimes oddly named folders - other people's work, internet. You name a folder without thinking, there are obvious names for some - accounts, articles - but others have the quality of junk drawers, you hardly remember their contents, you never imagine that one day someone else would be rummaging through them.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation

“It began with a telephone call from Isabella. She wanted to know where Christopher was, and I was put in the awkward position of having to tell her that I didn't know. To her this must have sounded incredible. I didn't tell her that Christopher and I had separated six months earlier, and that I hadn't spoken to her son in nearly a month.”
― Katie Kitamura, A Separation