Top 100 Nicole Krauss Quotes
#1. The malpractice for advice-giving is like five times as much as a craniotomy.
Nicole Krauss
#2. At the end, all that is left of you are your possessions
Nicole Krauss
#3. 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
#4. Don't you see?" I said. "He could change every detail, but he couldn't change her." "But why?" His obtuseness frustrated me. "Because he was in love with her!" I said. "Because, to him, she was the only thing that was real.
Nicole Krauss
#5. After all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?
Nicole Krauss
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. You hear a sound and it's truth turning in its grave.
Nicole Krauss
#9. He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard [ ... ]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.
Nicole Krauss
#10. To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.
Nicole Krauss
#11. 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
#12. In one's youth, one has tremendous access to one's feelings. And as one gets older, some of those feelings kind of drift away. But so much more happens to you. There's more at stake in life.
Nicole Krauss
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.
Nicole Krauss
#17. 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
#18. The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed, or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it.
Nicole Krauss
#19. The little boy I watched throwing pebbles into the empty fountain, he wasn't too old to climb trees. You could tell he had too much wisdom for his age. Probably he believed that he wasn't made for this world. I wanted to say to him: If not you, who?
Nicole Krauss
#20. I was never a man of great ambition
I cried too easily
I didn't have a head for science
Words often failed me
While others prayed I only moved my lips
Nicole Krauss
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Three taps means "Are you alive?" Two means "Yes," one "No.
Nicole Krauss
#26. 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
#27. The truth is that she told me she couldn't love me. When she said goodbye, she was saying goodbye forever.
And yet.
I made myself forget. I don't know why. I keep asking myself. But I did.
Nicole Krauss
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.
Nicole Krauss
#31. A wave of nausea came over me. And yet. Sometimes you need a stroke of genius and, lo and behold, genius comes and strokes you
Nicole Krauss
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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.
Nicole Krauss
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. Empty teacups gathered around her and dictionary pages fell at her feet.
Nicole Krauss
#40. He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it.
Nicole Krauss
#41. You can't imagine how hard I am on myself. Nothing pummels me like my own doubts, the feeling of how far I still have to go.
Nicole Krauss
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#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 truth is the thing I invented so that I could survive.
Nicole Krauss
#47. Part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you.
Nicole Krauss
#48. Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.
Nicole Krauss
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. It is impossible to distrust one's writing without awakening a deeper distrust in oneself.
Nicole Krauss
#52. 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
#53. The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.
Nicole Krauss
#55. I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back. We were locked in a stare of mutual disgust.
Nicole Krauss
#56. 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.
Nicole Krauss
#57. 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
#58. Sooner or later she'll figure out the truth: you're a shell of a man, all she has to do is knock against you to find out you're empty.
Nicole Krauss
#59. I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.
Nicole Krauss
#60. When we went into the ocean, I watched his body as he dove into the waves, and it gave me a feeling in my stomach that wasn't an ache but something different.
Nicole Krauss
#61. By heart, this is not an expression I use lightly. My heart is weak and unreliable.
Nicole Krauss
#62. When people spoke to him, he heard less and less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not. He learned to decipher the meaning of certain silences, which is like solving a tough case without any clues, with only intuition.
Nicole Krauss
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. And yet still the question was there, and my mind went to it like a tongue probing the tender spot of a loose tooth: it hurt but I wanted to know
Nicole Krauss
#66. She abandoned the garden, and the mums and asters that had trusted her to see them through to the first frost hung their waterlogged heads.
Nicole Krauss
#67. I'm the opposite of someone like David Grossman, who knows how his characters walk, and how they smell. I don't allow myself to imagine what mine look like at all. My sense of them comes from the inside. They remain, by necessity, physically vague in my mind.
Nicole Krauss
#68. 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
#69. I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)
Nicole Krauss
#72. But as I remember it, he looked alternately bored and preoccupied throughout the meal, as if, while one part of him was drinking Bordeaux and cutting his food into bite-sized morsels, the other half was engaged with shepherding a herd of goats across a bone-dry plain.
Nicole Krauss
#73. Holy shit, Bird," I whispered through my teeth. "At least try to be normal. You have to at least try.
Nicole Krauss
#74. 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
#75. You are a shell of a man, all she has to do is knock against you to find out you are empty.
Nicole Krauss
#76. I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.
Nicole Krauss
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes things worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger.
Nicole Krauss
#80. All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen.
Nicole Krauss
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. It's strange what the heart can do when the mind is giving the directions.
Nicole Krauss
#85. Maybe Grodzenski was showing me, with his quiet pride, the reason he hummed a little while he worked.
Nicole Krauss
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.
Nicole Krauss
#89. 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
#90. Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.
Nicole Krauss
#91. How was it possible to wake up every day and be recognizable to another when so often one was barely recognizable to oneself?
Nicole Krauss
#92. I have realised just how important it is to readers to feel that fictional stories are based on reality.
Nicole Krauss
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. Who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness?
Nicole Krauss
#96. After she left everything fell apart. No Jew was safe. There were rumors of unfathomable things, and because we couldn't fathom them we failed to believe them, until we had no choice and it was too late. p 8
Nicole Krauss
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. There are so many ways to be alive, but only one way to be dead.
Nicole Krauss
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