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Nicole Krauss Quotes | Quotes said by Nicole Krauss

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #1

    ...after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?


  • Nicole Krauss Quote #2

    ...en el momento más importante de su vida no había sabido elegir las palabras.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #3

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

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #4

    —Es mejor que sea un secreto. —¿Por qué? —Porque así no podrán quitárnoslo”.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #5

    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.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #6

    And he isn't crying for her, not for his grandma, he's crying for himself: that he: too, is going to die one day. And before that his friends wil die, and the friends of his friends, and, as time passes, the children of his friends, and, if his fate is truly bitter, his own children. (58)

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #7

    Así pues, él hizo lo más difícil que había hecho en su vida: cogió el sombrero y se fue. Y si el hombre que una vez fue el chico que prometió no enamorarse de ninguna otra muchacha mientras viviera cumplió su promesa, no fue por terquedad, ni siquiera por lealtad. No pudo evitarlo.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #8

    Aside from myself, there was no sign of me.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #9

    At night the sky is pure astronomy.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #10

    At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same, that when my book ended I'd end, a great wind would sweep through my rooms carrying the pages away, and when the air cleared of all those fluttering white sheets the room would be silent, the chair where I sat empty.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #11

    Because it hardly ends with falling in love. Just the opposite. I don't need to tell you, Your Honor, I sense that you understand true loneliness. How you fall in love and it's there that the work begins: day after day, year after year, you must dig yourself up, exhume the contents of your mind and sould for the other to sift through so that you might be known to him, and you, too, must spend days and years wading through all that he excavates for you alone, the archaeology of his being, how exhausting it became, the digging up and the wading through, while my own work, my true work, lay waiting for me. Yes, I always thought there would be more time left for me, more time left for us, and for the child we might one day have, but I never felt that my work could be put aside as they could, my husband and the idea of our child, a little boy or girl that I sometimes even tried to imagine, but always only vaguely enough that he or she remained a ghostly emissary of our future, just her back while she sat playing with her blocks on the floor, or just his feet sticking out of the blanket on our bed, a tiny pair of feet. What of it, there would be time for them, for the life they stood for, the one I was not yet prepared to live because I had not yet done what I had meant to do in this one.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #12

    Deslizó los dedos por su espalda de arriba abajo, sobre la fina blusa y, durante un momento, se olvidó del peligro, agradeciendo que el mundo marque divisiones, para que podamos superarlas sintiendo la dicha de acercarnos al otro más y más, aun reconociendo en el fondo, con tristeza, que hay diferencias insuperables.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #13

    Empty teacups gathered around her and dictionary pages fell at her feet.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #14

    Era normal ensartar las palabras en un hilo para guiarlas y evitar que se extraviaran por el camino hacia su destino

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #15

    Érase una vez un niño que amaba a una niña, y la risa de ella era como una pregunta que él quería pasar la vida contestando

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #16

    Érase una vez un niño que amaba a una niña, y la risa de ella era como una pregunta que él quería pasar la vida contestando.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #17

    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 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 Quote #18

    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.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #19

    Having begun to feel, people’s desire to feel grew. They wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how it sometimes hurt. People became addicted to feeling. They struggled to uncover new emotions.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #20

    He couldn’t have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life.

    This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn’t exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges.

    The owner took her time unpacking the books she’d bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love. She’d never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called 'The Age of Silence.'

    The owner of the secondhand bookstore lowered the volume of the radio. She flipped to the back flap of the book to find out more about the author, but all it said was that Zvi Litvinoff had been born in Poland and moved to Chile in 1941, where he still lived today. There was no photograph. That day, in between helping customers, she finished the book. Before locking up the shop that evening, she placed it in the window, a little wistful about having to part with it.

    The next morning, the first rays of the rising sun fell across the cover of The History of Love. The first of many flies alighted on its jacket. Its mildewed pages began to dry out in the heat as the blue-gray Persian cat who lorded over the shop brushed past it to lay claim to a pool of sunlight. A few hours later, the first of many passersby gave it a cursory glance as they went by the window.

    The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it.

    And that’s what happened. One afternoon a tall young man saw the book in the window. He came into the shop, picked it up, read a few pages, and brought it to the register. When he spoke to the owner, she couldn’t place his accent. She asked where he was from, curious about the person who was taking the book away. Israel, he told her, explaining that he’d recently finished his time in the army and was traveling around South America for a few months. The owner was about to put the book in a bag, but the young man said he didn’t need one, and slipped it into his backpack. The door chimes were still tinkling as she watched him disappear, his sandals slapping against the hot, bright street.

    That night, shirtless in his rented room, under a fan lazily pushing around the hot air, the young man opened the book and, in a flourish he had been fine-tuning for years, signed his name: David Singer.

    Filled with restlessness and longing, he began to read.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #21

    HOW ANGELS SLEEP. Unsoundly. They toss and turn, trying to understand the mystery of the living. They know so little about what it's like to fill a new prescription for glasses and suddenly see the world again, with a mixture of disappointment and gratitude ... Also, they don't dream. For this reason, they have one less thing to talk about. In a backward way, when they wake up they feel as if there is something they are forgetting to tell each other. There is disagreement among the angels as to whether this is a result of something vestigial, or whether it is the result of the empathy they feel for the Living, so powerful it sometimes makes them weep. In general, they fall into these two camps on the subject of dreams. Even among the angels, there is the sadness of division.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #22

    I finally understood that no matter what I did, or who I found, I—he—none of us—would ever be able to win over the memories she had of Dad, memories that soothed her even while they made her sad, because she’d built a world out of them she knew how to survive in, even if no one else could.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #23

    I left the library. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten, I stood on the sidewalk, a nothing, a gatherer of dust. People hurried past me. and everyone who walked by was happier than I. I felt the old envy. I would have given anything to be one of them.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #24

    I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #25

    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 Quote #26

    I though, So this is how they send the angel. Stalled at the age when she loved you most.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #27

    I tried to make sense of things. Now that I think about it, I have always tried. It could be my epitaph. LEO GURSKY: HE TRIED TO MAKE SENSE.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #28

    I was familiar with the little mating rituals of getting to know each other, of dragging out the stories from childhood, summer camp, and high school, the famous humiliations, and the adorable things you said as a child, the familial dramas—of having a portrait of yourself, all the while making yourself out to be a little brighter, a little more deep than deep down you knew you actually were. And though I hadn’t had more than three or four relationships, I already knew that each time the thrill of telling another the story of yourself wore off a little more, each time you threw yourself into it a little less, and grew more distrustful of an intimacy that always, in the end, failed to pass into true understanding.

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #29

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

  • Nicole Krauss Quote #30

    I’m imagining your response as you read this letter —which by then will have spent a week or two sitting in this lagoon, then another month riding the chaos of the Italian mail system, before finally crossing the Atlantic and being passed over to the US Post Office, who will have transferred it into a sack to be pushed along in a cart by a mailman who’ll have slugged through rain or snow in order to slip it through your mail slot where it will have dropped to the floor, to wait for you to find it.

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