Quotes from Nicole Krauss

How little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, for lack of a better word, being human.

Bend a people around the shape of what they lost, and let everything mirror its absent form

When you are young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close -- as close as you can get -- to another person only makes clear that impassable distance between you.

But. I knew. Believe me when I say, I knew it then as I know it now. It pains me to think how I never told you, and also to think of all you could have been.

That was the end of my search to find someone that would make my mother happy again. I finally understood that no matter what I did, or who I found, I–he–none of us–would ever be able to win over the memories she had of Dad, memories that soothed her even while they made her sad, because she'd built a world out of them she knew how to survive in, even if no one else could.

When I was young, I thought that I would live my life as freely as the writers and artists I took as my heroes. But in the end I wasn't brave enough to resist the current pulling me toward convention.

She was one of a group of girls he'd observed bloom from scraggly weeds into tropical beauties who churned the air around them into a dense humidity.

My son's mother, the girl I fell in love with when I was ten, died five years ago. I expect to join her soon, at least in that. Tomorrow. Or the next day. Of that I am convinced. I thought it would be strange to live in the world without her in it. And yet. I'd gotten used to living with her memory a long time ago. Only at the very end did I see her again. I snuck into her room in the hospital and sat with her every day.

c'era una volta un ragazzo che amava una ragazza, e la sua risata era una domanda a cui lui avrebbe voluto rispondere per il resto della sua vita.

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, so close to death that I could spit into it and whisper: L'chaim.

Maybe this is how I'll go, in a fit of laughter, what could be better, laughing and crying, laughing and singing, laughing so as to forget that I am alone, that it is the end of my life, that death is waiting outside the door for me.

There were certain places he always seemed to return to, squares or street corners, like refrains, points of convergence where the city doubled back on itself before escaping again around the corner.

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

Daniel was twenty-three, a year younger than I was, and though he hadn't yet published a book of poems he seemed to have spent his time better, or more imaginatively, or maybe what could be said is that he felt a pressure to go places, meet people, and experience things that, whenever I have encountered it in someone, has always made me envious.

His memory had abandoned him, and though he had searched within himself all these weeks, he could find no desire to have it returned. If it came back now, he felt he would turn it away, and the knowledge of this renouncement, a small act of defiance, gave him a feeling of liberty.

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.

Quand apprendras-tu qu'il n'existe pas un mot pour chaque chose ?

He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard […]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.

Il était une fois un garçon qui aimait une fille, et son rire était une question à laquelle il voulait répondre toute sa vie.

For Chanukah I asked for a sleeping bag. The one of my mother got me had pink hearts on it, was made of flannel, and would keep me alive for about five seconds in subzero temperatures before I died of hypothermia.

That to choose on Abraham, one Moses, one David, was also to reject all the others that might have been

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 emptiness. But the sea one feels. And so surrounded, so steadily held, so gently rocked - so differently organized - one's thoughts come in another form.

I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.

I took a drink, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, repeating the gesture that was made a hundred times by my father and his father and his father's father, eyes half closed as the sharpness of the alcohol replaced the sharpness of grief.