Quotes from Nicole Krauss

Se había ido, y lo único que quedaba era el espacio en que habías crecido en torno a ella, rodeándola, como crece un árbol rodeando una cerca.

At the moment the postman rang the bell, Litvinoff's pen has been poised above a blank piece of paper, his eyes watery with revelation, filled with the feeling that he was on the verge o understanding the essence of something. But when the bell rang the thought was lost, and Litvinoff, ordinary again, dragged his feet down the dark hallway and opened the door where the mailman stood in the sunlight.

Y entonces le dio un beso. Aquel beso era una pregunta que él deseó estar contestando durante el resto de su vida.

Deslizó los dedos por su espalda de arriba abajo, sobre la fina blusa y, durante un momento, se olvidó del peligro, agradeciendo que el mundo marque divisiones, para que podamos superarlas sintiendo la dicha de acercarnos al otro más y más, aun reconociendo en el fondo, con tristeza, que hay diferencias insuperables.

Staring out the window, Litvinoff imagined the two thousand copies of The History of Love as a flock of two thousand homing pigeons that could flap their wings and return to him to report on how many tears shed, how many laughs, ho many passages read aloud, how many cruel closings of the cover after reading barely a page, how many never opened at all.

en el momento más importante de su vida no había sabido elegir las palabras.

One day I saw it: how she looked back at the man that j the business suit who stood across a subway car from her, burning a hole through her with his eyes. Her stare was a challenge.

The third movement is one of the most moving passages ever written, and I've never listened to it without feeling as if I alone have been lifted up on the shoulders of some giant creature touring the charred landscape of all human feeling.

To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky. My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.

Why do people always have to be named after dead people? If they had 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...?

My child, My love and my regret, as you were when I first laid eyes on you, a tiny old man who hadn't the time to brush off his ancient expression, naked and misshapen in the nurse's arms.

These mistakes were heart-breaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen , because they didn't go around with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said., they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they'd understood correctly. Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say, Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I have always been right to love you.

Loneliness turned into depression

And then I thought: 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.

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 longer faces the sun, it stubbornly leans to the left, choosing against physical need in favor of an act of creativity. I poured the rest of my water into its pot. What does it mean, anyway, to flourish?

You are a shell of a man, all she has to do is knock against you to find out you are empty.

It isn't like that for everyone, you know. Some people...just get happier and happier everyday. And some people...just get sadder and sadder. And some people, like you, get both. What about you? Are you the happiest and saddest right now that you've ever been? Of course I am. Why? Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.

But really he just wanted to steal a little more time before he had to go back home again where the truth would be waiting.

When I sat up he was looking at me. His face was hopeful and unbelieving and also a little sad, and I wondered if it was anything like my father's face when he looked at my mother all those years ago at the Dead Sea, setting in motion a train of events that had finally brought me here, to the middle of nowhere, with a boy I'd grown up with but hardly knew.

Exista nenumarate feluri de a fi viu, dar un singur fel de a fi mort.

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 everything?

I remember the first time I realized I could make myself see something that wasn't there. I was ten years old, walking home from school. Some boys from my class ran by shouting and laughing. I wanted to be like them. And yet. I didn't know how. I'd always felt different from the others, and the difference hurt. And then I turned the corner and saw it. A huge elephant, standing alone in the square. I knew I was imagining it. And yet. I wanted to believe. So I tried. And I found I could.

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?

And then I thought: Perhaps that is what it means to be a father—to teach your child to live without you.