Nicole Krauss Quotes

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.

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.

. . . she gave him one of those broad smiles she reserved for strangers, as if she were aware of being able to pass, in their eyes, for an ordinary woman.

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.

...The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!

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.

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.

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

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

I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.

Better to try and fail than not to try at all

Getting a book published made me feel a little bit sad... I felt driven by the need to write a book, rather than the need to write. I needed to figure out what was important to me as a writer.

To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that cold be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame.

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

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.

I have realised just how important it is to readers to feel that fictional stories are based on reality.

My first novel, 'Man Walks Into a Room,' is about a man who's lost his memory and has to start a second life. On one level, it's about how we create a coherent sense of self.

When the word 'nostalgia' was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology - not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness.

I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read.

I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook - this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.

If the book is a mystery to its author as she's writing, inevitably it's going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

You can't imagine how hard I am on myself. Nothing pummels me like my own doubts, the feeling of how far I still have to go.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been

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

And so he did the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away.

At first Babel longed for the use of just two words: Yes and No. But he knew that just to utter a single word would be to destroy the delicate fluency of silence.

The truth is that she told me she couldn't love me. When she said goodbye, she was saying goodbye forever. And yet. I made myself forget. I don't know why. I keep asking myself. But I did.

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.

There was no one to call me to bed, no one to demand that the rhythms of my life operate in a duet.

The idea that we've outgrown ends up limiting us and we have to make a choice about what we're going to do in our lives.

I do realize that the reader needs some form of resolution. Sometimes I think of it almost like writing a musical score where things have to harmonize and certain lines have to come to a close.

I have a very strong sense of architecture in my novels. But at first it's sometimes like building a doorknob before you have a door, and a door before you have a room.

Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first.

What interests me very much as a writer is the ability for writing to have our lives to be occupied so vividly by others. I think that's what we long for as writers.

The unique thing that literature provides is to be able to step so fully into another situation and condition.

One is always changing. I don't want to write the same book and I couldn't, because I'm a different person.

In one's youth, one has tremendous access to one's feelings. And as one gets older, some of those feelings kind of drift away. But so much more happens to you. There's more at stake in life.

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.