Nicole Krauss Quotes

“He died alone because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone.”

Variant: Then she kissed him. Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.
Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 11

“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?”

Source: The History of Love

“The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.”

Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 351

“… we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.”

Source: The History of Love

“The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces.”

Source: Great House

“… larger than life… I've never understood that expression. What's larger than life?”

Source: The History of Love

Nicole Krauss Quotes about life

“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.”

Source: The History of Love

“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.”

Source: Great House

“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.”

Source: The History of Love

“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.”

“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.”

Source: The History of Love

“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.”

Source: The History of Love

Nicole Krauss Quotes about the world

“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.”

Source: The History of Love

“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.”

Source: The History of Love

“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.”

Source: The History of Love

“… The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!”

Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 7

“Franz Kafka is dead.He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." The people whispered and nodded among themselves. […] They turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers' shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees, Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children woke up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice.”

“When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?”

Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 187

Nicole Krauss: Trending quotes

“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.”

Source: The History of Love

“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.”

Source: The History of Love

“Part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you.”

Source: The History of Love

Nicole Krauss Quotes

“Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.”

Source: The History of Love

“Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.”

Source: The History of Love

“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.”

“… An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand…”

Source: The History of Love

“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”

Source: The History of Love

“Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.”

Source: The History of Love

“Then he almost but didn't say the two sentence he'd been meaning to say for years: part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you”

Source: The History of Love

“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.”

“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.”

Source: The History of Love

“That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.”

Source: The History of Love

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

Source: The History of Love

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

Source: Great House

“Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.”

“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.”

Source: The History of Love

“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.”

Source: The History of Love

“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.”

Source: Great House

“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.”

Source: The History of Love

“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.”

Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 164

“… 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.”

“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.”

“So many words get lost. They leave the mouthand lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past.”

Source: Great House

“He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it.”

Source: The History of Love

“… after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?”

Source: The History of Love

“It's strange what the heart can do when the mind is giving the directions.”

Source: Great House

“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.”

Source: The History of Love

“How was it possible to wake up every day and be recognizable to another when so often one was barely recognizable to oneself?”

Source: The History of Love

Nicole Krauss book Man Walks Into a Room

Source: Man Walks Into a Room

“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.”

“There are so many ways to be alive, but only one way to be dead.”

Source: Great House

“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.”

Source: The History of Love

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

Source: Great House

“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.”

Source: The History of Love

“After all who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of their loneliness”

Source: Great House

“Then I turned the page and at the top it said THINGS I MISS ABOUT M and there was a list of 15 things, and the first was THE WAY HE HOLDS THINGS. I did not understand how you can miss the way somebody holds things.”

Source: The History of Love

“Aside from myself, there was no sign of me.”

Source: The History of Love

“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.”

Source: The History of Love

Nicole Krauss book Man Walks Into a Room

Source: Man Walks Into a Room

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

“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.”

Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 8

“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.”

Source: The History of Love (2005), P.6

“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.”

Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 349

““Once upon a time, there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered, and everything was possible. A stick could be a sword, a pebble could be a diamond, a tree, a castle. Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a house across the field, from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was queen and he was king. In the autumn light her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls, and when the sky grew dark, and they parted with leaves in their hair.”

Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 8

“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.”

The History of Love (2005)

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

Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 349

“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.”

Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 5