Top 100 Nicole Krauss Quotes
#1. You are a shell of a man, all she has to do is knock against you to find out you are empty.
Nicole Krauss
#2. I assumed it was someone trying to sell me something. They're always calling to sell. Once they said if I sent in a check for $99 I'd be pre-approved for a credit card, and I said, Right, sure, and if I step under a pigeon I'm preapproved for a load of shit
Nicole Krauss
#5. But how can one regret what, to the mind, has never existed? Even loss is an inaccurate description, for what loss is without the awareness of losing?
Nicole Krauss
#6. No, what I felt was the torment of waiting, stuck between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next which might or might not bring a hail storm, plane crash, poetic justice, or a miraculous reversal.
Nicole Krauss
#7. By heart, this is not an expression I use lightly. My heart is weak and unreliable.
Nicole Krauss
#8. ONE THING I AM NEVER GOING TO DO WHEN I GROW UP
Is fall in love, drop out of college, learn to subsist on water and air, have a species named after me, and ruin my life.
Nicole Krauss
#10. The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.
Nicole Krauss
#11. The third movement is one of the most moving passages ever written, and I've never listened to it without feeling as if I alone have been lifted up on the shoulders of some giant creature touring the charred landscape of all human feeling.
Nicole Krauss
#12. 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
#13. There are so many ways to be alive, but only one way to be dead.
Nicole Krauss
#14. It's also true that sometimes people felt things and, because there was no word for them, they went unmentioned. The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it - just to name it - must have been like trying to catch something invisible. (pg 107)
Nicole Krauss
#15. One is always changing. I don't want to write the same book and I couldn't, because I'm a different person.
Nicole Krauss
#16. Who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness?
Nicole Krauss
#17. Somewhere in the far north of Canada there wuld be snow, falling soundlessly overy the Beaufort Sea, falling over the Artic without a soul to see it. What kind of weather was that, Samson wondered, and how was one to use this information except as proof that the world was too much to bear?
Nicole Krauss
#18. When the word 'nostalgia' was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology - not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness.
Nicole Krauss
#19. I have realised just how important it is to readers to feel that fictional stories are based on reality.
Nicole Krauss
#20. Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.
Nicole Krauss
#21. I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.
Nicole Krauss
#22. And if the man who once upon a time had been a boy who promised he'd never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise, it wasn't because he was stubborn or even loyal. He couldn't help it.
Nicole Krauss
#23. Maybe Grodzenski was showing me, with his quiet pride, the reason he hummed a little while he worked.
Nicole Krauss
#24. It's strange what the heart can do when the mind is giving the directions.
Nicole Krauss
#25. Alone in my room, wrapped in a blanket, I whimpered and talked aloud to myself, recalling the lost glory of my youth when I considered myself, and was considered by others, a bright and capable person. It seemed that was all gone now.
Nicole Krauss
#26. 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.
Nicole Krauss
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because they didn't go around with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said, they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they had understood correctly.
Nicole Krauss
#30. 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.
Nicole Krauss
#31. 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.
Nicole Krauss
#32. 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
#33. 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.
Nicole Krauss
#34. Once, at the peak of our shouting, Bird took a deep breath. At the top
of his lungs, he shrieked: "I! HAVE NOT! BEEN! UNHAPPY! MY WHOLE! LIFE!" "But
you're only seven," I said.
Nicole Krauss
#35. 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
#36. The misery of other people is only an abstraction [ ... ] something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence.
Nicole Krauss
#37. You hear a sound and it's truth turning in its grave.
Nicole Krauss
#38. 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
#39. In the beginning it was always the same. But. I kept trying. Then one day I accidentally moved as the shutter clicked. A shadow appeared. The next time I saw the outline of my face, and a few weeks later my face itself. It was the opposite of disappearing.
Nicole Krauss
#40. 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
#41. At the end, all that is left of you are your possessions
Nicole Krauss
#42. Put even a fool in front of the window and you'll get a Spinoza; in the end life makes window watchers of us all
Nicole Krauss
#43. When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit
Nicole Krauss
#44. The kiss stayed there with no place to go, no sensory reserve that could absorb it and file it away as a common act of intimacy, a thousand times received. He knew what Anna was asking: whether you could love someone without habits.
Nicole Krauss
#45. 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
#46. The fact that you got a little happier today doesn't change the fact that you also became a little sadder. Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you're the happiest and saddest you've ever been in your whole life.
Nicole Krauss
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. I try to make a point of being seen. Sometimes when I'm out, I'll buy a juice even when I'm not thirsty. If the store is crowded I'll even go so far as dropping change all over the floor, nickels and dimes skidding in every direction. All I want is not to die on a day I went unseen.
Nicole Krauss
#50. 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.
Nicole Krauss
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Where he saw a page of words, his friend saw the field of hesitations, black holes, and possibilities between the words. Where his friend saw dappled light, the felicity of flight, the sadness of gravity, he saw the solid form of a common sparrow.
Nicole Krauss
#54. Having begun to feel, people's desire to feel grew. They wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how it sometimes hurt. People became addicted to feeling. They struggled to uncover new emotions.
Nicole Krauss
#55. I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.
Nicole Krauss
#56. Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I'd been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it.
Nicole Krauss
#57. Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first.
Nicole Krauss
#58. 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
#59. I filled the sink with soapy water and washed the dirty pots. And with each pot and pan, and spoon I put away,I also put away a thought I couldn't bear until my kitchen and my mind returned to a state of mutual organisation.
Nicole Krauss
#60. In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.
Nicole Krauss
#61. There were other refugees around him experiencing the same fears and helplessness, but Litvinoff didn't find any comfort in this because 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. Litvinoff preferred to be alone.
Nicole Krauss
#62. If you don't know what it feels like to have someone you love put a hand below your bottom rib for the first time, what chance is there for love?
Nicole Krauss
#63. Life in general in my experience gets deeper and deeper, more and more profound, more and more complex, the older one gets.
Nicole Krauss
#64. 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
#65. And then I thought: perhaps that is what it means to be a father- to teach your child to live without you. If so no one was a greater father than I.
Nicole Krauss
#66. I wished to punish her for her intolerable stoicism, which made it impossible for me to ever be truly needed by her in the most profound ways a person can need another, a need that often goes by the name of love.
Nicole Krauss
#67. My child, My love and my regret, as you were when I first laid eyes on you, a tiny old man who hadn't the time to brush off his ancient expression, naked and misshapen in the nurse's arms.
Nicole Krauss
#68. There was no one to call me to bed, no one to demand that the rhythms of my life operate in a duet.
Nicole Krauss
#69. If I had a camera,' I said, 'I'd take a picture of you every day. That way I'd remember how you looked every single day of your life.
Nicole Krauss
#70. He died alone because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone.
Nicole Krauss
#71. All these years Litvinoff had imagined he was so much like his friend. He'd prided himself on what he considered their similarities. But the truth was that he was no more like the man fighting a fever in bed ten feet away than he was like the cat that had just slunk off: they were different species.
Nicole Krauss
#72. He was an average man. A man willing to accept things as they were, and, because of this, he lacked the potential to be in anyway original.
Nicole Krauss
#73. For me, the most powerful way to write about something is through the absence of it. Rather than writing about what it was to become a new mother, I wrote, for example, a father facing death and addressing his estranged son about the regrets of his relationship.
Nicole Krauss
#74. Family! So sorry, forgive me. I thought I'd met all the mispocheh!
Nicole Krauss
#75. I know sometimes things are hard with Mum." "She misses Dad," I said, which was like pointing out that a sky-scraper is tall. Uncle Julian nodded.
Nicole Krauss
#76. And so he did the hardest thing he'd ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away.
Nicole Krauss
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. I finally understood that no matter what I did, or who I found, I-he-none of us-would ever be able to win over the memories she had of Dad, memories that soothed her even while they made her sad, because she'd built a world out of them she knew how to survive on even if no one else could.
Nicole Krauss
#80. 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.
Nicole Krauss
#81. Why do people always get named after dead people? If they have to be named after anything at all, why can't it be things, which have more permanence, like the sky or the sea, or even ideas, which never really die, not even bad ones?
Nicole Krauss
#82. 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
#83. These things are lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone taking the time to write it all down. That Litvinoff had a wife who was so devoted is, to be frank, the only reason anyone knows anything about him at all.
Nicole Krauss
#84. I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw us to literature is that it gives us this very attractive illusion that there is meaning in the world - things connect.
Nicole Krauss
#85. I had the elated, otherworldly feeling I sometimes get entering the sphere of another's life, when for a moment changing my banal habits and living like that seems entirely possible, a feeling that always dissolves by the next morning, when I wake up to the familiar, unmovable shapes of my own life.
Nicole Krauss
#86. 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
#87. It would mark the end of a year that he might look back on as hands, a pivot between two lines. Or not: maybe enough time, would pass that eventually he would look back on his life, all of it, as a series of events both logical and continuous.
Nicole Krauss
#88. The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you're left with is your ambition.
Nicole Krauss
#90. I used to think that if I had a choice between writing well and living well, I would choose the former. But now I think that's sheer lunacy. Writing weighs so much less, in the great cosmic equation, than living.
Nicole Krauss
#91. I was considered attractive in those days, some people even called me beautiful, though my skin was never good and it was this that I noticed when I looked in the mirror
Nicole Krauss
#92. There's a hurried intensity in the strokes
you can see where he scratched into the wet paint with the end of the brush. It's as if he knew there wasn't much time left. And yet, there's a serenity in his face, a sense of something that's survived its own ruin.
Nicole Krauss
#93. I though, So this is how they send the angel. Stalled at the age when she loved you most.
Nicole Krauss
#94. Why is it that there was always a unit on history, math, science and god knows what other useless, totally forgettable information you taught those seventh graders year after year, but never any unit on death? No exercises, no workbooks, no final exams on the only subject that matters?
Nicole Krauss
#95. The way Misha tells it, he drove like a blind man, giving the car almost full independence to feel its way along, bumping off things, only giving the wheel a spin with the tips of this fingers when the situation verged on life threatening.
Nicole Krauss
#96. Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.
Nicole Krauss
#97. Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant. once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs.
Nicole Krauss
#98. 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
#99. HE LIKED TO COOK AND LAUGH AND SING, COULD START A FIRE WITH HIS HANDS, FIX THINGS THAT WERE BROKEN, AND EXPLAIN HOW TO LAUNCH THINGS INTO SPACE, BUT HE DIED WITHIN NINE MONTHS
Nicole Krauss
#100. Bruno, my old faithful. I haven't sufficiently described him. Is it enough to say he is indescribable? No. Better to try and fail than not to try at all.
Nicole Krauss
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