Nicole Krauss
24 quotes
Biography
Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in The Best American Short Stories 2003, The Best American Short Stories 2008 and The Best American Short Stories 2019.
"Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering."
"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."
"Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit"
"All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen."
"The words of our childhood became strangers to us- we couldn't use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language."
"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."
"Even after the only person whose opinion I cared about left on a boat for America, I continued to fill pages with her name."
"When I got up again, I'd shed the only part of me that had ever thought I'd find words for even the smallest bit of life."
"These things were lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone ever taking the time to write it all down."
"Perhaps that is what it means to be a father- to teach your child to live without you. If so, no one was a greater father than I."
"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."
"Sometimes I think: I am older than this tree, older than this bench, older than the rain. And yet. I'm not older than the rain. It's been falling for years and after I go it will keep on falling."
"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?"
"The singular power of literature lies not in its capacity for accurate representation of mass commonalities, but its ability to illuminate the individual life in a way that expands our understanding of some previously unseen or unarticulated aspect of existence."
"But how can one regret what, to the mind, has never existed? Even loss is an inaccurate description, for what loss is without the awareness of losing?"
". . . I would have let him go one finger at a time, until, without his realizing, he'd be floating without me. And then I thought, perhaps that is what it means to be a [parent] - to teach your child to live without you."
"To hike out alone in the desert; to sleep on the valley floor on a night with no moon, in the pitch black, just listening to the boom of silence: you can't imagine what that's like."