Intimacies
Katie Kitamura
Top 10 Best 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Contrary to popular belief, charisma was not inherent but had constantly to be reinforced.”
“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?”
“In the end, it took only a decade to become of a place, and that was not so very long.”
“I could understand anything, under the right circumstances and for the right person. It was both a strength and a weakness.”
“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.”
“But a narrative becomes persuasive not through complexity but conviction,”
“This was done for obvious reasons, there were great chasms beneath words, between two or sometimes more languages, that could open up without warning.”
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Book Keywords:
language, interpretation, home
