Quotes from Nicole Krauss

After all, the world population of artists has exploded, almost no one is not an artist now; in turning our attention inward, so have we turned all of our hope inward, believing that meaning can be found or made there. Having cut ourselves off from all that is unknowable and that might truly fill us with awe, we can only find wonderment in our own powers of creativity.

The malpractice for advice-giving is like five times as much as a craniotomy.

And he isn't crying for her, not for his grandma, he's crying for himself: that he: too, is going to die one day. And before that his friends wil die, and the friends of his friends, and, as time passes, the children of his friends, and, if his fate is truly bitter, his own children. (58)

I considered my options. Either I could run away and never go back to school again, maybe even leave the country as a stowaway on a ship bound for Australia. Or I could risk everything and confess to her. The answer was obvious: I was going to Australia. I opened my mouth to say goodbye forever. And yet. What I said was: I want to know if you'll marry me.

She abandoned the garden, and the mums and asters that had trusted her to see them through to the first frost hung their waterlogged heads.

The more I've learned in my life, the more acutely I've felt my hunger and blindness, and at the same time the closer I've felt to the end of hunger, the end of blindness. At times I've felt myself to be clinging onto the rim—of what I can hardly say without the risk of sounding ridiculous—only to slip and find myself deeper in the hole than ever. And there, in the dark, I find again in myself a form of praise for all that continues to crush my certainty.

As the rifles were pointed at his chest he wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard. He had thought the possibilities of human silence were endless. But as the bullets tore from the rifles, his body was riddled with the truth. And a small part of him laughed bitterly because, anyway, how could he have forgotten what he had always known: There's no match for the silence of God.

If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.

I was considered attractive in those days, some people even called me beautiful, though my skin was never good and it was this that I noticed when I looked in the mirror

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 anyway original.

At the end, all that is left of you are your possessions

The singular power of literature lies not in its capacity for accurate representation of mass commonalities, but its ability to illuminate the individual life in a way that expands our understanding of some previously unseen or unarticulated aspect of existence.

I won't waste your time with the injuries of my childhood, with my loneliness, or the fear and sadness of the years I spent inside my parents' marriage, under the reign of my father's rage, after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

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 sould, 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.

Why is it that there was always a unit on history, math, science and god knows what other useless, totally forgettable information you taught those seventh graders year after year, but never any unit on death? No exercises, no workbooks, no final exams on the only subject that matters?

Jsou chvíle, kdy na vás pÃ…â"¢ijde jakási jasnozÃ…â"¢ivost a vy najednou prohlédnete skrz zdi do jiného rozmÄ›ru, na který jste zapomnÄ›li nebo se rozhodli ho nevnímat, abyste mohli dál žít s nejr?znÄ›jÅ¡ími iluzemi, díky nimž je život, zejména život s druhými, v?bec možný.

I helped those in, who were locked out, others i helped keep out, what couldn't be let in, so that they could sleep without nightmares.

I knew that to find and to feel Yoav again would be terribly painful, because of what had become of him, and because of what I knew he could ignite in me, a vitality that was excruciating because like a flare it lit up the emptiness inside me and exposed what I always secretly knew about myself: how much time I'd spent being only partly alive, and how easily I'd accepted a lesser life.

And yet isn't it true of all of us? That there are things we feel to be at the heart of our nature that are not borne out by the evidence around us, and so, to protect our delicate sense of integrity, we elect, however unconsciously, to see the world other than the way it really is? And sometimes it leads to transcendence, and sometimes it leads to the unconscionable.

I though, So this is how they send the angel. Stalled at the age when she loved you most.

A wave of nausea came over me. And yet. Sometimes you need a stroke of genius and, lo and behold, genius comes and strokes you

the tender brutality of physical existence...the insoluble contradiction of being animals cursed with self-reflection, and moral beings cursed with animal instincts...

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.

I looked at the map of India on the wall. Every 14-year-old should know the exact location of Calcutta. It wouldn't do to go around without the faintest clue of where Calcutta was.