Quotes from Nicole Krauss

I don't know what to say about it, except that it moved me in a way one hopes to be moved each time he begins a book.

But as I remember it, he looked alternately bored and preoccupied throughout the meal, as if, while one part of him was drinking Bordeaux and cutting his food into bite-sized morsels, the other half was engaged with shepherding a herd of goats across a bone-dry plain.

I knew how to raise my own child, what did he think it was, a game of Scrabble or Monopoly, there are no rules, was she so blind that she couldn't see that all that mental midget had done was turn her into a nervous wreck, full of doubt about something that had come naturally to her from the beginning, something any idiot could see, which was that she was a wonderful mother, full of love and patience?

I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook - this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago.

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.

I'm the opposite of someone like David Grossman, who knows how his characters walk, and how they smell. I don't allow myself to imagine what mine look like at all. My sense of them comes from the inside. They remain, by necessity, physically vague in my mind.

To hike out alone in the desert; to sleep on the valley floor on a night with no moon, in the pitch black, just listening to the boom of silence: you can't imagine what that's like.

I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.

No, I don't harbor any mystical ideas about writing, Your Honor, it's work like any other kind of craft; the power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is.

Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first.

So many words get lost. They leave the mouthand lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past.

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.

Perhaps that is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you.

When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?

I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in.

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.

When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?

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.

I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in.

What about you? Are you 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.

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.

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.

Part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you.

And if the man who once upon a time had been a boy who promised he'd never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise, it wasn't because he was stubborn or even loyal. He couldn't help it.