She was truly happy for the first time in her life, and it felt just like living in a small room painted all white, with windows looking out onto impenetrable forest.

— Alexandra Kleeman

So full. Full of lobster meat and the sadness of the lobster meat. Full of the feeling of having cracked hundreds upon hundreds of precious shells. Full of the sound and the sight of destruction, the lobsters dead in a pile, some of them with lipstick marks on their empty husks. Their voices piled up on one another. I felt a whispering coming from deep within my belly, the voices not yet at rest, and they said in a tone sympathetic and unsympathetic at the same time, Next Next Next. 'Well,' I said, 'what do we do next?' 'Lobster dinner?' he asked, chuckling a little as if I ought to be chuckling with him as well.

— Alexandra Kleeman

Standing there small among the boxes of Andy Makes that rose like brownish cartoon cliffs around him, he resembled the videos I'd seen of sea lions floating angelically among the kelp, black bodies filmed from below, their shapes cut out in bright sunlight, bodies mistakable for those of a human being. I felt the memory of a shadowy arm around me, a watcher again, sitting there on the couch with my boyfriend, watching the animals become prey. Somewhere there were giant whales feeding on creatures too small to see, pressing them against fronds of baleen with a tongue the size of a sedan. There were polar bears killing seals, tearing ovoid chunks from out of their smooth, round bellies. In the surrounding vastness of the warehouse, I heard something scratching against the concrete floor and knew there were rats here, scraping a thin film of nutrient from the dry packaged matter that surrounded them. Life was everywhere, inescapable, imperative.

— Alexandra Kleeman

Tell me, is there someone in your life who's been sharing your life too closely? A friend or a loved one? Is there someone who's been taking up your time and not giving any of it back?

— Alexandra Kleeman

The past was just a place where uncontrolled freaks you had never consciously decided to include in your life entered it anyway and staggered around, breaking things.

— Alexandra Kleeman

There had been times when I thought I might be with you indefinitely, something approaching an entire life. But then when there was only a finite amount of time, a thing we could both see the limit of, I wasn't so sure.

— Alexandra Kleeman

There was a hazy damp film in his eyes that I recognized from emotions in old movies, projected large on darkened screens.

— Alexandra Kleeman

There was no better way to live, or worse. It was all terrible, and you had to do it constantly,

— Alexandra Kleeman

There was nothing else I could do but apologize myself. His apology had left a residue in me, a residue on my thinking, and continuing on in this house without saying it would be entirely awkward. It would turn the small space toxic. So I said it, though I tried to lessen the potency of the apology by mumbling.

— Alexandra Kleeman

These masked men were going to bring me to a cleaner place, where things were more sharply distinguished from one another and where I would finally have the space to figure out who I was without other people nudging me all the time into shapes they thought I should have.

— Alexandra Kleeman