Quotes from Nicole Krauss

Once, coming out of the cool, dark lab into the heat of the desert sun, he'd briefly wondered if the emptiness he'd been so staunchly guarding was, not the absence of memory, but actually a memory itself: a recollection of the blazing white potential that had existed before he was born. The emptiness an infant possesses in the very first moments, when consciousness begins like the answer to a question never asked.

When I woke again, it was into a homesickness that felt physical, as its symptoms had been physical for seventeenth-century mercenary soldiers who'd fallen ill from being so far from home, the first to be diagnosed with the disease of nostalgia. Though never so acute, the longing for something formless and unnamed, had been with me since I was a child. Though now I want to say that the division I felt was, in a sense, within me: the division of being both here and not here, but rather there.

How you fall in love and it's there that the work begins: day after day, year after year, you must dig yourself up, exhume the contents of your mind and soul for the other to sift through so that you might be known to him, and you, too, must spend days and years wading through all that he excavates for you alone, the archaeology of his being, how exhausting it became, the digging up and the wading through, while my own work, my true work, lay waiting for me.

Cand te tii cu cineva de mana, de pilda, e un mod de a-ti aduce aminte cum e cand nu spuneti nimic impreuna. Si noaptea, cand e prea intuneric ca sa mai vedem ceva, simtim nevoia sa gesticulam cu ajutorul trupului celuilalt, pentru a ne face intelesi.

But in the end, it isn't up to the writer to decide how his or her work will be used.

He trusted her because she cared for him and there was no one else.

Looking at his reflection in the dark window, Litvinoff believed something had been peeled away and a truth revealed to him: He was an average man. A man willing to accept things as they were, and, because of this, he lacked the potential to be in any way original. And though he was wrong in every way about this, after that night nothing could dissuade him.

He watched the old man sleep and felt the vast loneliness of the world, the loneliness passed from person to person like a beach ball at a rock concert, kept aloft at all costs, and this was his moment to shoulder it. Or maybe it was his own personal loneliness, a solitary, errant longing no one else could ever know, and the knowledge of this stoked the already existing loneliness, made it widen and blur at the edges until it included everything.

You have to stick up for yourself,he told me. But it's bad to throw rocks, I said. I know, he said. You're smarter than me, you'll find something better than rocks.

Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.

The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.

Of the two thousand original copies printed of The History of Love, some were bought and read, many were bought and not read, some were given as gifts, some sat fading in bookstore windows serving as landing docks for flies, some were marked up with pencil, and a good many were shredded to pulp along with other unread or unwanted books, their sentences parsed and minced in the machine's spinning blades.

You know, sometimes I get the feeling that we're just a bunch of habits, she said. The gestures we repeat over and over, they're just our need to be recognized. Her eyes were fixed on the TV, as if she was reading subtitles. I mean that without them we would be unidentifiable. We'd have to reinvent ourselves every minute.

Franz Kafka is Dead He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. Come down! they cried to him. Come down! Come down! Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. I can't, he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. Why? they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. Because then you'll stop asking for me.

No es que hayamos olvidado por completo el lenguaje de los gestos (…) cuando está oscuro y no podemos ver, sentimos la necesidad de tocar el cuerpo del otro para hacernos entender".

Wat er op het eind van je overblijft zijn je bezittingen. Misschien is het me daarom nooit gelukt iets weg te gooien.

Era normal ensartar las palabras en un hilo para guiarlas y evitar que se extraviaran por el camino hacia su destino

Peleaba por descubrir sentimientos nuevos (…). Se creaban nuevas formas de alegría al tiempo que nuevas clases de tristeza. La eterna decepción de lo que es la vida, el alivio de un respiro inesperado, el miedo a la muerte".

Sentir en las piernas las vibraciones de su voz, es percibir la realidad en toda su extensión

There were other refugees around him experiencing the same fears and helplessness, but Litvinoff didn't find any comfort in this because 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. Litvinoff preferred to be alone.

Es mejor que sea un secreto. —¿Por qué? —Porque así no podrán quitárnoslo".

there was stored substrata along

What I lost is, in the grand scope of things, almost... negligible. It's true that there's grief: it wakes me in a cold sweat thinking,, Who was I? What did I care about? What did I find funny sad, stupid, painful? Was I happy? All of those memories I accumulated, gone. Which one, if there could have been only one, would I have kept?

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 had understood correctly.