Top 150 Nicole Krauss Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.”

— Nicole Krauss

52. “After she left everything fell apart. No Jew was safe. There were rumors of unfathomable things, and because we couldn’t fathom them we failed to believe them, until we had no choice and it was too late. p 8.”

— Nicole Krauss

53. “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.”

— Nicole Krauss

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

— Nicole Krauss

55. “Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person’s silence.”

— Nicole Krauss

56. “There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes things worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger.”

— Nicole Krauss

57. “I was never a man of great ambition I cried too easily I didn’t have a head for science Words often failed me While others prayed I only moved my lips.”

— Nicole Krauss

58. “My first novel, ‘Man Walks Into a Room,’ is about a man who’s lost his memory and has to start a second life. On one level, it’s about how we create a coherent sense of self.”

— Nicole Krauss

59. “There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you’d forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularily life with other people, possible.”

— Nicole Krauss

60. “That’s what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I’m not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.”

— Nicole Krauss

61. “Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant. once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs.”

— Nicole Krauss

62. “There was no one to call me to bed, no one to demand that the rhythms of my life operate in a duet.”

— Nicole Krauss

63. “The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.”

— Nicole Krauss

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

— Nicole Krauss

65. “Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant. once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs. But sometimes, at rare moments, a memory of him will return to me with such suddenness and clarity that all the feeling I’ve pushed down for years springs out like a jack-in-the-box.”

— Nicole Krauss

66. “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.”

— Nicole Krauss

67. “She struggled with her sadness, but tried to conceal it, to divide it into smaller and smaller parts and scatter these in places she thought no one would find them.”

— Nicole Krauss

68. “After all who doesn’t wish to make a spectacle of their loneliness.”

— Nicole Krauss

69. “Bruno, my old faithful. I haven’t sufficiently described him. Is it enough to say he is indescribable? No. Better to try and fail than not to try at all.”

— Nicole Krauss

70. “She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you’d grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.”

— Nicole Krauss

71. “To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another’s life.”

— Nicole Krauss

72. “I wished to punish her for her intolerable stoicism, which made it impossible for me to ever be truly needed by her in the most profound ways a person can need another, a need that often goes by the name of love.”

— Nicole Krauss

73. “In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.”

— Nicole Krauss

74. “It’s strange what the heart can do when the mind is giving the directions.”

— Nicole Krauss

75. “Empty teacups gathered around her and dictionary pages fell at her feet.”

— Nicole Krauss

76. “There’s no match for the silence of GOD.”

— Nicole Krauss

77. “The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it-just to name it-must have been like trying to catch something invisible.”

— Nicole Krauss

78. “If you don’t know what it feels like to have someone you love put a hand below your bottom rib for the first time, what chance is there for love?”

— Nicole Krauss

79. “I smiled back, the importance of manners, my mother always said, is inversely related to how inclined one is to use them, or, in other words, sometimes politeness is all that stands between oneself and madness.”

— Nicole Krauss

80. “The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces.”

— Nicole Krauss

81. “One is always changing. I don’t want to write the same book and I couldn’t, because I’m a different person.”

— Nicole Krauss

82. “At first Babel longed for the use of just two words: Yes and No. But he knew that just to utter a single word would be to destroy the delicate fluency of silence.”

— Nicole Krauss

83. “I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.”

— Nicole Krauss

84. “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.”

— Nicole Krauss

85. “The fact that you got a little happier today doesn’t change the fact that you also became a little sadder. Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you’re the happiest and saddest you’ve ever been in your whole life.”

— Nicole Krauss

86. “When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.”

— Nicole Krauss

87. “I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one.”

— Nicole Krauss

88. “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.”

— Nicole Krauss

89. “I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.”

— Nicole Krauss

90. “Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say ‘Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I’ve always been right to love you.’ Because of the frequency of these mistakes, over time the gesture for asking forgiveness evolved into the simplest form. Just to open your palm was to say: Forgive me.”

— Nicole Krauss

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

— Nicole Krauss

92. “Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it’s something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about.”

— Nicole Krauss

93. “And so he did the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away.”

— Nicole Krauss

94. “Sometimes I forget that the world is not on the same schedule as I. That everything is not dying, or that if it is dying it will return to life, what with a little sun and the usual encouragement.”

— Nicole Krauss

95. “Some people, like your sister, just get happier and happier everyday. And some people, like Baba Asch, just get sadder and sadder. And some people, like you, get both.′ ‘What about you? Are you the happiest and the saddest right now than you’ve ever been?’ ‘Of course I am.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.”

— Nicole Krauss

96. “He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it.”

— Nicole Krauss

97. “To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky. My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.”

— Nicole Krauss

98. “I do realize that the reader needs some form of resolution. Sometimes I think of it almost like writing a musical score where things have to harmonize and certain lines have to come to a close.”

— Nicole Krauss

99. “In one’s youth, one has tremendous access to one’s feelings. And as one gets older, some of those feelings kind of drift away. But so much more happens to you. There’s more at stake in life.”

— Nicole Krauss

100. “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.”

— Nicole Krauss