Nicole Krauss citations

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

“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?”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”