Nicole Krauss famous quotes

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Love #Cute #Romantic

One of us had loved the other more perfectly, had watched the other more closely, and one of us listened and the other hadn’t, and one of us held on to the ambition of the one idea far longer than was reasonable, whereas the other, passing a garbage can one night, had casually thrown it away.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Love #Ambition #Night

What about you? Are you happiest and saddest right now that you've ever been?" "Of course I am." "Why?" "Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.
-- Nicole Krauss

I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Years #Forgiving #Want

When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?
-- Nicole Krauss

Sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter of an inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Giving Up #Sacrifice #Sky

To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and by name, and then to know it with your eyes closed so that when something is gone, it can be recognized by the shape of its absence. So that you can continue to possess the lost, because absence is the only constant thing. Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Eye #Names #Space

At night the sky is pure astronomy.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Night #Sky #Astronomy

Sometimes I get the feeling that we're just a bunch of habits. The gestures we repeat over and over, they're just our need to be recognized. Without them, we'd be unidentifiable. We have to reinvent ourselves every minute.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Feelings #Gestures #Needs

She struggled with her sadness, but tried to conceal it, to divide it into smaller and smaller parts and scatter these in places she thought no one would find them.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Sadness

Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Loneliness #Organs

I like to think the world wasn't ready for me, but maybe the truth is that I wasn't ready for the world. I've always arrived too late for my life.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Life #Thinking #World

Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone's hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted--wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought: Please don't look at me. If you don't, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Hurt #Men #Hair

For her I changed pebbles into diamonds, shoes into mirrors, I changed glass into water, I gave her wings and pulled birds from her ears and in her pockets she found the feathers, I asked a pear to become a pineapple, a pineapple to become a lightbulb, a lightbulb to become the moon, and the moon to become a coin I flipped for her love...
-- Nicole Krauss

#Love #Wedding #Moon

Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Mother #Children #Pain

So many words get lost. They leave the mouthand lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Past #Rainy Day #Rushing

...after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?
-- Nicole Krauss

#Childhood #Domestic Violence #Wrecks

When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Book #Feelings #Lasts

Perhaps that is what it means to be a father-to teach your child to live without you.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Children #Father #Mean

...An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand...
-- Nicole Krauss

#Hands #Average #Four

. . . I would have let him go one finger at a time, until, without his realizing, he'd be floating without me. And then I thought, perhaps that is what it means to be a [parent] - to teach your child to live without you.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Children #Mean #Parent

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Long #Silence #Needs

Sometimes I thought about nothing and sometimes I thought about my life. At least I made a living. What kind of living? A living. It wasn't easy. I found out how little is unbearable.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Littles #Unbearable #Kind

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Nice #Mouths #Would Be

I’ve always liked the feeling of traveling light; there is something in me that wants to feel I could leave wherever I am, at any time, without any effort. The idea of being weighed down made me uneasy, as if I lived on the surface of a frozen lake and each new trapping of domestic life - a pot, a chair, a lamp - threatened to be the thing that sent me through the ice.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Light #Ice #Ideas

I knew that to find and to feel Yoav again would be terribly painful, because of what had become of him, and because of what I knew he could ignite in me, a vitality that was excruciating because like a flare it lit up the emptiness inside me and exposed what I always secretly knew about myself: how much time I'd spent being only partly alive, and how easily I'd accepted a lesser life.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Alive #Vitality #Would Be

. . . she gave him one of those broad smiles she reserved for strangers, as if she were aware of being able to pass, in their eyes, for an ordinary woman.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Eye #Able #Ordinary

The malpractice for advice-giving is like five times as much as a craniotomy.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Giving #Advice #Malpractice

...our eyes locked in one of those looks that sometimes happen between strangers, when both wordlessly agree that reality contains sinkholes whose depths neither can ever hope to fathom.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Eye #Reality #Looks

When I was with Yoav, everything in me that had been sitting stood up. He had a way of looking at me with a kind of unabashed directness that made me shiver. It's something amazing to feel that for the first time someone is seeing you as you really are, not as they wish you, or you wish yourself, to be.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Wish #Sitting #Way

We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break. And it’s there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Waiting #Tents #Patterns

There is a fallacy that the powerful emotion of youth mellows with time. Not true. One learns to control and suppress it. But it doesn't lessen. It simply hides and concentrates itself in more discreet places. When one accidentally stumbles into one of these abysses, the pain is spectacular.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Pain #Powerful #Emotion

No, I don't harbor any mystical ideas about writing, Your Honor, it's work like any other kind of craft; the power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Lying #Writing #Ideas

Even among the angels, there is the sadness of division.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Angel #Sadness #Division

I smiled back, the importance of manners, my mother always said, is inversely related to how inclined one is to use them, or, in other words, sometimes politeness is all that stands between oneself and madness.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Mother #Use #Madness

All my life I have arrived early only to find myself standing self-consciously on a corner, outside a door, in an empty room, but the closer I get to death the earlier I arrive, the longer I am content to wait, perhaps to give myself the false sensation that there is too much time rather than not enough.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Doors #Self #Giving

I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back. We were locked in a stare of mutual disgust.
-- Nicole Krauss

#World #Disgusting #Staring

Our kiss was niticlimactic. It wasn't that the kiss was bad, but it was just a note of punctuation in our long conversation, a parenthetical remark made in order to assure each other of a deeply felt agreement, a mutual offer of companionship, which is so much more rare than sexual passion or even love.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Passion #Kissing #Agreement

We move through the day like two hands of a clock: sometimes we overlap for a moment, then come apart again, carrying on alone. Everyday exactly the same: the tea, the burnt toast, the crumbs, the silence.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Moving #Hands #Two

In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Tables #Hungry #Refuse

The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Doors #Faces #Moments

lonely people are always up in the middle of the night.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Lonely #Night #People

Sometimes I forget that the world is not on the same schedule as I. That everything is not dying, or that if it is dying it will return to life, what with a little sun and the usual encouragement.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Encouragement #Dying #Schedules

Franz Kafka is dead. He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me."
-- Nicole Krauss

#Night #Silence #Tree

Getting a book published made me feel a little bit sad... I felt driven by the need to write a book, rather than the need to write. I needed to figure out what was important to me as a writer.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Book #Writing #Important

David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I've ever read. [To the End of the Land is] powerful, shattering, and unflinching. To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Powerful #Taken #Land

If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Space #Most Romantic #Needs

To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that cold be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Taken #Numbers #Bookstores

What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I'd say it's this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Mean #Healing #Literature

And he isn't crying for her, not for his grandma, he's crying for himself: that he: too, is going to die one day. And before that his friends wil die, and the friends of his friends, and, as time passes, the children of his friends, and, if his fate is truly bitter, his own children. (58)
-- Nicole Krauss

#Children #Grandma #Fate

The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Memories #Data #Ideas

It is impossible to distrust one's writing without awakening a deeper distrust in oneself.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Writing #Awakening #Impossible

There's no match for the silence of GOD.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Silence

Better to try and fail than not to try at all
-- Nicole Krauss

#Trying #Failing

Later - when things happened that they could never have imagined - she wrote him a letter that said: When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything
-- Nicole Krauss

#Letters #Said

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering. When they were ten he asked her to marry him. When they were eleven he kissed her for the first time... For her sixteenth birthday he gave her an English dictionary and together they learned the words.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Girl #Laughter #Boys

There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you'd forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularily life with other people, possible.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Wall #Order #People

And it's like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway across the world, only this was the opposite of disaster, how by accident she saved me with that thoughtless act of grace, and she never knew, and how that, too, is the part of the history of love.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Opposites #Grace #World

There were many things they simply didn't talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family.
-- Nicole Krauss

#People #Silence #Way

The more freedom I allow myself as a writer to wander, become lost and go into uncertain territory - and I am always trying to go to the more awkward place, the more difficult place - the more frightening it is, because I have no plan.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Awkward #Trying #Territory

...The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!
-- Nicole Krauss

#World #Language

Without memories to cloud it, the mind perceives with absolute clarity. Each observation stands out in stark relief. In the beginning, when there's not yet a smudge, the slate still blank, there is only the present moment: each vital detail, shocked color, the fall of light. Like film stills. The mind relentlessly open to the world, deeply impressed, even hurt by it: not yet gauzed by memory.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Hurt #Memories #Fall

Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Beautiful #Eye #Hands

Then he almost but didn't say the two sentence he'd been meaning to say for years: part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you
-- Nicole Krauss

#Love You #Years #Two

I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Lasts #Finals #Moments

Mom?" I said. She turned. "Can I talk to you about something?" "Of course, darling. Come here." I took a few steps into the room. There was so much I wanted to say. "I need you to be --" I said, and then I started to cry. "Be what?" she said, opening her arms. "Not sad," I said.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Mom #Arms #Rooms

Part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Love You #Glasses #Made

Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Writing #Giving #Misunderstood

All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist
-- Nicole Krauss

#Parent #World #Surprise

That he liked to think of himself as a philosopher. That he questioned all things, even the most simple, to the extent that when someone passing him on the street raised his hat and said, 'Good day,' Litvinoff often paused so long to weigh evidence that by the time he'd settled on an answer the person had gone on his way, leaving him standing alone.
-- Nicole Krauss

#Good Day #Simple #Thinking