Nicole Krauss Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

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
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
THE DEATH OF LEOPOLD GURSKY Leopold Gursky started dying on August 18, 1920. He died learning to walk. He died standing at the blackboard. And once, also, carrying a heavy tray. He died practicing a new way to sign his name. Opening a window. Washing his genitals in the bath. He died alone, because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone. Or he died thinking about Alma. Or when he chose not to.

Nicole Krauss
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
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
But loneliness, true loneliness, is impossible to accustom oneself to, and while I was still young I thought of my situation as somehow temporary, and did not stop hoping and imagining that I would meet someone and fall in love...Yes, there was a time before I closed myself off to others.

Nicole Krauss
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
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
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
Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist, there are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges and absorbs the impact.

Nicole Krauss
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
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
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
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
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.

Nicole Krauss
When I got up again, I'd shed the only part of me that had ever thought I'd find words for even the smallest bit of life.

Nicole Krauss
I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.

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

Nicole Krauss
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
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
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
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
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
Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it's intoxicating, and for a little while, you actually feel like you've become one with the other person, merged souls and so on. You think you'll never be lonely again.

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

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

Nicole Krauss
All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen.

Nicole Krauss
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