Top 150 Nicole Krauss Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Better to try and fail than not to try at all.”

— Nicole Krauss

2. “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.”

— Nicole Krauss

Featured in: Storytelling Quotes, Quotes About Heart, Romantic Quotes, Valentine's Day Quotes

3. “What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I’d say it’s this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.”

— Nicole Krauss

4. “When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything?”

— Nicole Krauss

5. “The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you’re left with is your ambition.”

— Nicole Krauss

6. “We move through the day like two hands of a clock: sometimes we overlap for a moment, then come apart again, carrying on alone. Everyday exactly the same: the tea, the burnt toast, the crumbs, the silence.”

— Nicole Krauss

7. “When the word ‘nostalgia’ was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology – not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness.”

— Nicole Krauss

8. “I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.”

— Nicole Krauss

9. “I used to think that if I had a choice between writing well and living well, I would choose the former. But now I think that’s sheer lunacy. Writing weighs so much less, in the great cosmic equation, than living.”

— Nicole Krauss

10. “Then he almost but didn’t say the two sentence he’d been meaning to say for years: part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you.”

— Nicole Krauss

11. “At night the sky is pure astronomy.”

— Nicole Krauss

12. “It’s one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you.”

— Nicole Krauss

13. “All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist.”

— Nicole Krauss

14. “Even among the angels, there is the sadness of division.”

— Nicole Krauss

15. “All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen.”

— Nicole Krauss

16. “Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been.”

— Nicole Krauss

17. “I like to think the world wasn’t ready for me, but maybe the truth is that I wasn’t ready for the world. I’ve always arrived too late for my life.”

— Nicole Krauss

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

— Nicole Krauss

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

— Nicole Krauss

20. “You can’t imagine how hard I am on myself. Nothing pummels me like my own doubts, the feeling of how far I still have to go.”

— Nicole Krauss

21. “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.”

— Nicole Krauss

22. “Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it’s intoxicating, and for a little while, you actually feel like you’ve become one with the other person, merged souls and so on. You think you’ll never be lonely again.”

— Nicole Krauss

23. “I try to make a point of being seen. Sometimes when I’m out, I’ll buy a juice even when I’m not thirsty. If the store is crowded I’ll even go so far as dropping change all over the floor, nickels and dimes skidding in every direction. All I want is not to die on a day I went unseen.”

— Nicole Krauss

24. “We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break. And it’s there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.”

— Nicole Krauss

25. “There are so many ways to be alive, but only one way to be dead.”

— Nicole Krauss

26. “If the book is a mystery to its author as she’s writing, inevitably it’s going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.”

— Nicole Krauss

27. “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.”

— Nicole Krauss

28. “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.”

— Nicole Krauss

29. “Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.”

— Nicole Krauss

30. “Sometimes I thought about nothing and sometimes I thought about my life. At least I made a living. What kind of living? A living. It wasn’t easy. I found out how little is unbearable.”

— Nicole Krauss

31. “No, what I felt was the torment of waiting, stuck between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next which might or might not bring a hail storm, plane crash, poetic justice, or a miraculous reversal.”

— Nicole Krauss

32. “I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back. We were locked in a stare of mutual disgust.”

— Nicole Krauss

33. “The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.”

— Nicole Krauss

34. “I know there is a moral to this story, but I don’t know what it is.”

— Nicole Krauss

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

35. “He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom. To reach the armoire to get a pair of underpants he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn’t choose that moment to sit on his face. At night, when he closed his eyes, he felt it looming above him.”

— Nicole Krauss

36. “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.”

— Nicole Krauss

37. “I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read.”

— Nicole Krauss

38. “Sometimes I get the feeling that we’re just a bunch of habits. The gestures we repeat over and over, they’re just our need to be recognized. Without them, we’d be unidentifiable. We have to reinvent ourselves every minute.”

— Nicole Krauss

39. “When you’re younger, it’s all theoretical. It’s all potential. As you get older, it becomes actual, and your life gets filled with unexpected complexity; some of it asked for, and some of it not. It becomes richer, I find.”

— Nicole Krauss

40. “When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn’t control what came through it.”

— Nicole Krauss

Featured in: Reading Quotes

41. “Alone in my room, wrapped in a blanket, I whimpered and talked aloud to myself, recalling the lost glory of my youth when I considered myself, and was considered by others, a bright and capable person. It seemed that was all gone now.”

— Nicole Krauss

42. “How was it possible to wake up every day and be recognizable to another when so often one was barely recognizable to oneself?”

— Nicole Krauss

43. “He died alone because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone.”

— Nicole Krauss

44. “I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.”

— Nicole Krauss

45. “Life in general in my experience gets deeper and deeper, more and more profound, more and more complex, the older one gets.”

— Nicole Krauss

46. “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.”

— Nicole Krauss

47. “The more freedom I allow myself as a writer to wander, become lost and go into uncertain territory – and I am always trying to go to the more awkward place, the more difficult place – the more frightening it is, because I have no plan.”

— Nicole Krauss

48. “It is impossible to distrust one’s writing without awakening a deeper distrust in oneself.”

— Nicole Krauss

49. “The truth is that she told me she couldn’t love me. When she said goodbye, she was saying goodbye forever. And yet. I made myself forget. I don’t know why. I keep asking myself. But I did.”

— Nicole Krauss

50. “Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.”

— Nicole Krauss