Quotes from Nicole Krauss

Atunci am v?zut-o. E ciudat ce poate urzi mintea când inima o îmboldeÈ™te. Ar?ta altfel decât mi-o aminteam eu. ?i totuÈ™i. Era aceeaÈ™i. Ochii: aÈ™a am recunoscut-o. Mi-am spus: "Vas?zic? aÈ™a È›i se arat? îngerul. Oprit la vârsta la carea te-a iubit cel mai mult.

Lonely people are always up in the middle of the night.

I thought: I didn't live forever.

during the first moments of sadness that seemed to slip in through the open window without our noticing, disturbing the rarefied atmosphere that comes with the beginning of love...

Sometimes I thought about nothing and sometimes I thought about my life. At least I made a living. What kind of living? A living. I lived. It wasn't easy. And yet. I found out how little is unbearable.

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.

the people who arrive to us from nowhere and nothing are only ever that: a gift, received without having known to ask, with only the wonder of how life delivers and delivers.

I found out how little is unbearable.

If they have to be named after anything at all, why can't it be things, which have more permanence, like the sky or the sea, or even ideas, which never really die, not even bad ones?

He could have broken her in two with one hand, but either she was already broken, or she wasn't going to break.

I simply came to believe that one, the factual circumstances of my life were almost accidental and didn't grow out of my own soul, and two, I possessed something unique, a special strength and depth of feeling that would allow me to withstand the hurt and injustice without being broken by it

Who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness?

If you don't know what it feels like to have someone you love put a hand below your bottom rib for the first time, what chance is there for love?

Somewhere in the far north of Canada there wuld be snow, falling soundlessly overy the Beaufort Sea, falling over the Artic without a soul to see it. What kind of weather was that, Samson wondered, and how was one to use this information except as proof that the world was too much to bear?

Childhood is a process of slowly recomposing oneself out of the borrowed materials of the world.

It took seven languages to make me; it would have been nice if I could have spoken just one. But I couldn't, so he leaned down and kissed me.

These valuable thing produced in us a feeling of intimidation. We knew that no matter how far we got in life, we would never really be meant for such fineness, that the few expensive antiques we did have had fallen to us from a higher life and now condescended to live among us.

to survive the dark and often terrifying passage of my life I came to believe certain thing about myself . . . I simply came to believe that one, factual circumstances of my life were almost accidental and didn't grow out of my own soul, and two, I possessed something unique, a special strength and depth of feeling that would allow me to withstand the hurt and injustice without being broken by it.

Some people, like your sister, just get happier and happier everyday. And some people, like Baba Asch, just get sadder and sadder. And some people, like you, get both.' 'What about you? Are you the happiest and the saddest right now than you've ever been?' 'Of course I am.' 'Why?' 'Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.

There were books everywhere. There were pens, and a blue glass vase, an ash tray from the Dolder Grand in Zürich, the rusted arrow of a weather vane, a little brass hourglass, sand dollars on the windowsill, a pair of binoculars, and empty wine bottle that served as a candle holder, wax melted down the neck. I touch this thing and that. At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions.

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.

The whole afternoon might go by without our saying a word. If we do talk, we might never speak in Yiddish. 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.

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.

The truth is the thing I invented so that I could survive.