Nicole Krauss quotes - page 4

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. (Nicole Krauss)
What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web. View quote
Nicole Krauss
I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw us to literature is that it gives us this very attractive illusion that there is meaning in the world - things connect. View quote
Nicole Krauss
That powers my desire to write: the sense of how quickly everything on the surface of life can be cut away and you can suddenly be inside the most inner part of the most inner life of a person. What does it feel like there, and what are the regrets and sensations and longings, and what is the music of it? View quote
Nicole Krauss
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. View quote
Nicole Krauss
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. View quote
Nicole Krauss
The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you're left with is your ambition. View quote
Nicole Krauss
I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated. View quote
Nicole Krauss
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. View quote
Nicole Krauss
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 yet 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. View quote
Nicole Krauss
One of us had loved the other more perfectly, had watched the other more closely, and one of us listened and the other hadn't, and one of us held on to the ambition of the one idea far longer than was reasonable, whereas the other, passing a garbage can one night, had casually thrown it away. (Nicole Krauss)
For her I changed pebbles into diamonds, shoes into mirrors, I changed glass into water, I gave her wings and pulled birds from her ears and in her pockets she found the feathers, I asked a pear to become a pineapple, a pineapple to become a lightbulb, a lightbulb to become the moon, and the moon to become a coin I flipped for her love. View quote
Nicole Krauss
At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived. View quote
Nicole Krauss
Perhaps that is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you. View quote
Nicole Krauss
The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark. View quote
Nicole Krauss
Sometimes, waking early before the others, wandering the rooms wrapped in a blanket or drinking my tea in the empty kitchen, I had that most rare of feelings, the sense that the world, so consistently overwhelming and incomprehensible, in fact has an order, oblique as it may seem, and I a place within it. View quote
Nicole Krauss
That he liked to think of himself as a philosopher. That he questioned all things, even the most simple, to the extent that when someone passing him on the street raised his hat and said, 'Good day,' Litvinoff often paused so long to weigh evidence that by the time he'd settled on an answer the person had gone on his way, leaving him standing alone. View quote
Nicole Krauss
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. View quote
Nicole Krauss
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. View quote
Nicole Krauss
I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back. We were locked in a stare of mutual disgust. View quote
Nicole Krauss
To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and by name, and then to know it with your eyes closed so that when something is gone, it can be recognized by the shape of its absence. So that you can continue to possess the lost, because absence is the only constant thing. Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been. (Nicole Krauss)
I wished to punish her for her intolerable stoicism, which made it impossible for me to ever be truly needed by her in the most profound ways a person can need another, a need that often goes by the name of love. View quote
Nicole Krauss
There's no match for the silence of GOD. View quote
Nicole Krauss
Now that mine is almost over, I can say that the one thing that struck me most about life is the capacity for change. One day you're a person and the next day they tell you you're a dog. At first it's hard to bear, but after a while you learn not to look at it as a loss. There's even a moment when it becomes exhilarating to realize just how little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, for lack of a better word, being human. View quote
Nicole Krauss
And it's like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway across the world, only this was the opposite of disaster, how by accident she saved me with that thoughtless act of grace, and she never knew, and how that, too, is the part of the history of love. View quote
Nicole Krauss