Nicole Krauss - The History of Love (2005)

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

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

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

Nicole Krauss