Nicole Krauss Quotes
...we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.
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.
there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.
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.
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.
To hike out alone in the desert; to sleep on the valley floor on a night with no moon, in the pitch black, just listening to the boom of silence: you can't imagine what that's like.
That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.
I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.
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.
The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you're left with is your ambition.
Perhaps that is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you.
...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.
I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.
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.
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.
To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.
Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.
She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.
If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.
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.
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.
When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.
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.
The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.
Life in general in my experience gets deeper and deeper, more and more profound, more and more complex, the older one gets.
Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.
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
We met each other when we were young, before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.
Empty teacups gathered around her and dictionary pages fell at her feet.
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.
In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.
The malpractice for advice-giving is like five times as much as a craniotomy.
I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)
...larger than life...I've never understood that expression. What's larger than life?
It's one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you.
If the book is a mystery to its author as she's writing, inevitably it's going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.
I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook - this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago.
I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.
I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.
I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read.