Nicole Krauss Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

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

Nicole Krauss
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
The little boy I watched throwing pebbles into the empty fountain [...] You could tell that 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
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
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
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
These things were lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone ever taking the time to write it all down.

Nicole Krauss
If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms - i you find yourself at a loss for what do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignnes of your own body - it's because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what's inside and what's outside, was so much less.

Nicole Krauss
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
He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood.

Nicole Krauss
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
Sometimes, waking early before the others, wandering the rooms wrapped in a blanket or drinking my tea in the empty kitchen, I had that most rare of feelings, the sense that the world, so consistently overwhelming and incomprehensible, in fact has an order, oblique as it may seem, and I a place within it.

Nicole Krauss
Now we'd known each other for two years, the side of my calf was touching his shins, and his stomach was against my ribs. He said, "I don't think it's end of world to be my girlfriend." 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
After all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

Nicole Krauss
Tell me, was I the sort of person who took your elbow when cars passed on the street, touched your cheek while you talked, combed your wet hair, stopped by the side of the road in the country to point out certain constellations, standing behind you so that you had the advantage of leaning and looking up?

Nicole Krauss
Sometimes I think: I am older than this tree, older than this bench, older than the rain. And yet. I'm not older than the rain. It's been falling for years and after I go it will keep on falling.

Nicole Krauss
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
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
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
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
I know there is a moral to this story, but I don't know what it is.

Nicole Krauss
The words of our childhood became strangers to us- we couldn't use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language.

Nicole Krauss
Even after the only person whose opinion I cared about left on a boat for America, I continued to fill pages with her name.

Nicole Krauss
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
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
We take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.

Nicole Krauss