Nicole Krauss Quotes

One is always in the hold of the world, but one doesn't physically feel it's hold, doesn't account for its effect. Cannot draw comfort from the hold of the world, which registers only as a neutral emp...

I danced the only way I knew how to dance: for life, crashing into the chairs, and spinning until I fell, so that I could get up and dance again, until dawn broke and found me prostrate on the floor,...

She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.

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

Jsou chvíle, kdy na vás přijde jakási jasnozřivost a vy najednou prohlédnete skrz zdi do jiného rozměru, na který jste zapomněli nebo se rozhodli ho nevnímat, abyste mohli dál žít s nejrůznějšími iluz...

I was considered attractive in those days, some people even called me beautiful, though my skin was never good and it was this that I noticed when I looked in the mirror

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 fr...

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 hai...

She's kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she's turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air.

It’s barely alive, but it is alive. More brown than green. There are parts that have withered. But still it lives, leaning always to the left. Even when I rotate it so that what faced the sun no longe...

The city hurt to look at, all angles and glints of sun like shattered glass.

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. I look exactly the same. No, you don't. You're changing all the time...

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

All my life I have arrived early only to find myself standing self-consciously on a corner, outside a door, in an empty room, but the closer I get to death the earlier I arrive, the longer I am conten...

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 coul...

When people spoke to him, he heard less and less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not. He learned to decipher the meaning of certain silences, which is like solving a toug...

There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes matter worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger.

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

Once upon a time a boy loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.

I had left my anger somewhere long ago. Put it down on a park bench and walked away. And yet. It had been so long, I didn't know any other way of being. One day I woke up and said to myself: It's not...