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.Collection: Party
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.Collection: Faithful
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 youCollection: Love 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.Collection: Girl
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 on even if no one else could.Collection: Memories
She [my mother] was the force around which our world turned. My mother was propelled through the universe by the brute force of reason. She was the judge in all our arguments. One disapproving word from her was enough to send us off to hide in a corner, where we would cry and fantasize our own martyrdom. And yet. One kiss could restore us to princedom. Without her, our lives would dissolve into chaos.Collection: Mother
The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.Collection: Truth Is
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.Collection: Lonely
... as a rule of thumb, whenever there appears a plural, correct for a singular. Should I ever let slip a royal WE, put me out of my misery with a swift blow to the head.Collection: Blow
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. p 8Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Littles
There were many things they simply didn't talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family.Collection: People
There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you'd forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularily life with other people, possible.Collection: Wall
Once upon a time you were a fish. How do you know? Because I was also a fish. You, too? Sure. A long time ago. Anyway, being a fish, you knew how to swim. You were a great swimmer. A champion swimmer, you were. You loved the water. Why? What do you mean, why? Why did I love the water? Because it was your life! And as we talked, I would have let him go one finger at a time, until, without his realizing, he'd be floating without me. Perhaps that is what it means to be a father-to teach your child to live without you.Collection: Children
Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have beenCollection: Space
After all who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of their lonelinessCollection: Loneliness
I won't waste your time with the injuries of my childhood, with my loneliness, or the fear and sadness of the years I spent inside my parents' marriage, under the reign of my father's rage, afer all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?Collection: Father
There are so many ways to be alive, but only one way to be dead.Collection: Alive
You’re lost in your own world, in the things that happen there, and you’ve locked all the doors. Sometimes I look at you sleeping. I wake up and look at you and I feel closer to you when you’re like that, unguarded, than when you’re awake. When you’re awake you’re like someone with her eyes closed, watching a movie on the inside of your eyelids. I can’t reach you anymore. Once upon a time I could, but not now, and not for a long time.Collection: Sleep
Empty teacups gathered around her and dictionary pages fell at her feet.Collection: Feet
And so he did the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away.Collection: Done
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.Collection: Writing
The fact that you got a little happier today doesn't change the fact that you also became a little sadder. Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you're the happiest and saddest you've ever been in your whole life.Collection: Mean
There was no one to call me to bed, no one to demand that the rhythms of my life operate in a duet.Collection: Bed
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 everythingCollection: Letters
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.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Goodbye
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.Collection: Kindness
But loneliness, true loneliness, is impossible to accustom oneself to, and while I was still young I thought of my situation as somehow temporary, and did not stop hoping and imagining that I would meet someone and fall in love...Yes, there was a time before I closed myself off to others.Collection: Falling In Love
Alone in my room, wrapped in a blanket, I whimpered and talked aloud to myself, recalling the lost glory of my youth when I considered myself, and was considered by others, a bright and capable person. It seemed that was all gone now.Collection: Gone
I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)Collection: Book
...The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!Collection: World
Mom?" I said. She turned. "Can I talk to you about something?" "Of course, darling. Come here." I took a few steps into the room. There was so much I wanted to say. "I need you to be --" I said, and then I started to cry. "Be what?" she said, opening her arms. "Not sad," I said.Collection: Mom
Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.Collection: Beautiful
A couple months after my heart attack, fifty-seven years after I'd given it up, I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.Collection: Couple
I'm not immune to the readers' desires. Sometimes they are my own, because I'm a reader, too. The readers' desire to know what really happened and what didn't. To have a glimpse into what's really the author and what isn't. I think we all have that and I wonder about what it means.Collection: Mean
The book Forest Dark wants to provoke questions about what is reality and why are we so given to believe that reality is firm and unbendable. There's a whole host of questions that the book is asking about that. Why do we believe that the world is only one way and as we see it? Why are we not open to the ways in which it might be otherwise.Collection: Believe
Obviously I've been reading Kafka for a long long time, since I was really young, and even before I ever read him I knew who he was. I had this weird sense that he was some kind of family. Like Uncle Kafka. Now I really think of him that way, the way we think about an uncle who opened up some path for being in a family that otherwise wouldn't have existed. I think of him that way as a writer and a familial figure.Collection: Reading
The rhyme always knows better than you, and leads you to places where you wouldn't otherwise have gotten to and that is absolutely the case. Leading off from formal poetry, there is something about when you pay attention to form and you allow it to have its own laws and you listen to those laws you really do end up in places you wouldn't otherwise go. Which isn't to say that I believe in following the rules when I write. I don't. Each of the forms in my books feels to me new.Collection: Believe
I know there is a moral to this story, but I don’t know what it is.Collection: Stories
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.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Reading
To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another’s life.Collection: Reading
Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone’s hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted – wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought: Please don’t look at me. If you don’t, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.Collection: Romance
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.Collection: Strong