Top 150 Nicole Krauss Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Put even a fool in front of the window and you’ll get a Spinoza; in the end life makes window watchers of us all.”

— Nicole Krauss

102. “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.”

— Nicole Krauss

103. “I finally understood that no matter what I did, or who I found, I-he-none of us-would ever be able to win over the memories she had of Dad, memories that soothed her even while they made her sad, because she’d built a world out of them she knew how to survive on even if no one else could.”

— Nicole Krauss

104. “I found out how little is unbearable.”

— Nicole Krauss

105. “If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms – i you find yourself at a loss for what do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignnes of your own body – it’s because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what’s inside and what’s outside, was so much less.”

— Nicole Krauss

106. “Part of you thought: Please don’t look at me. If you don’t, I can still turn away. And part of you thought. Look at me.”

— Nicole Krauss

107. “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.”

— Nicole Krauss

108. “I’ve reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.”

— Nicole Krauss

109. “When we went into the ocean, I watched his body as he dove into the waves, and it gave me a feeling in my stomach that wasn’t an ache but something different.”

— Nicole Krauss

110. “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.”

— Nicole Krauss

111. “The unique thing that literature provides is to be able to step so fully into another situation and condition.”

— Nicole Krauss

112. “Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I’d been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it.”

— Nicole Krauss

113. “I have realised just how important it is to readers to feel that fictional stories are based on reality.”

— Nicole Krauss

114. “Herman slipped his hand into mine, and I thought, An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone’s hand, and the next thing that happened was we kissed each other, and I found I knew how, and I felt happy and sad in equal parts, because I knew that I was falling in love, but it wasn’t with him.”

— Nicole Krauss

115. “Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone’s hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted – wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought: Please don’t look at me. If you don’t, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.”

— Nicole Krauss

116. “All these years Litvinoff had imagined he was so much like his friend. He’d prided himself on what he considered their similarities. But the truth was that he was no more like the man fighting a fever in bed ten feet away than he was like the cat that had just slunk off: they were different species.”

— Nicole Krauss

117. “To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that cold be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame.”

— Nicole Krauss

118. “There were many things they simply didn’t talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family.”

— Nicole Krauss

119. “I have a very strong sense of architecture in my novels. But at first it’s sometimes like building a doorknob before you have a door, and a door before you have a room.”

— Nicole Krauss

120. “Somewhere in the far north of Canada there wuld be snow, falling soundlessly overy the Beaufort Sea, falling over the Artic without a soul to see it. What kind of weather was that, Samson wondered, and how was one to use this information except as proof that the world was too much to bear?”

— Nicole Krauss

121. “In the months after the relationship ends, a person can seem to grow at a lightning rate, like in a nature documentary where weeks of footage is run at high speed to show a plant unfurling in seconds, but in reality the person has been growing all along, under the surface, and it is only in their new freedom, in their hair-raising aloneness, that the person can allow for these underground things to break through and unfurl themselves in the light.”

— Nicole Krauss

122. “What interests me very much as a writer is the ability for writing to have our lives to be occupied so vividly by others. I think that’s what we long for as writers.”

— Nicole Krauss

123. “Aside from myself, there was no sign of me.”

— Nicole Krauss

124. “When he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence. He discovered the places in a room where silence gathered; the folds of the curtain drapes, the deep bowls of the family silver. When people spoke to him he heard less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not.”

— Nicole Krauss

125. “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.”

— Nicole Krauss

126. “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.”

— Nicole Krauss

127. “What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.”

— Nicole Krauss

128. “My mother was the force around which our world turned. Unlike our father, who spent his life in the clouds, my mother was propelled through the universe by the brute force of reason. She was the judge in all of our arguments. One disapproving word from her was enough to send us off to hide in a corner, where we would cry and fantasize our own martyrdom. And yet. One kiss could restore us to princedom. Without her, our lives would dissolve into chaos.”

— Nicole Krauss

129. “One of us had loved the other more perfectly, had watched the other more closely, and one of us listened and the other hadn’t, and one of us held on to the ambition of the one idea far longer than was reasonable, whereas the other, passing a garbage can one night, had casually thrown it away.”

— Nicole Krauss

130. “She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air.”

— Nicole Krauss

131. “Where he saw a page of words, his friend saw the field of hesitations, black holes, and possibilities between the words. Where his friend saw dappled light, the felicity of flight, the sadness of gravity, he saw the solid form of a common sparrow.”

— Nicole Krauss

132. “The whole afternoon might go by without our saying a word. If we do talk, we might never speak in Yiddish. The words of our childhood became strangers to us – we couldn’t use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language.”

— Nicole Krauss

133. “Without memories to cloud it, the mind perceives with absolute clarity. Each observation stands out in stark relief. In the beginning, when there’s not yet a smudge, the slate still blank, there is only the present moment: each vital detail, shocked color, the fall of light. Like film stills. The mind relentlessly open to the world, deeply impressed, even hurt by it: not yet gauzed by memory.”

— Nicole Krauss

134. “If they have to be named after anything at all, why can’t it be things, which have more permanence, like the sky or the sea, or even ideas, which never really die, not even bad ones?”

— Nicole Krauss

135. “He had slept next to her for thirty-six years, and the mattress felt different without her weight, however slight, and without the rhythm of her breath the dark had no measure. There were times he woke feeling cold from the lack of the heat that once came from between her thighs and behind her knees. He might have even called her, if he could have momentarily forgotten that he already knew everything she could possibly say.”

— Nicole Krauss

136. “I hadn’t thought about it until just now, but the night Daniel rang our bell in the winter of 1970 was the end of November, the same time of year she died twenty-seven years later. I don’t know what’s that supposed to tell you; nothing, except that we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.”

— Nicole Krauss

137. “I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.”

— Nicole Krauss

138. “Childhood is a process of slowly recomposing oneself out of the borrowed materials of the world.”

— Nicole Krauss

139. “Except for when I was very little and thought that being an “engineer” meant he drove a train. Then I imagined him in the seat of an engine car the color of coal, a string of shiny passenger cars trailing behind. One day my father laughed and corrected me. Everything snapped into focus. 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

140. “I know sometimes things are hard with Mum.” “She misses Dad,” I said, which was like pointing out that a sky-scraper is tall. Uncle Julian nodded.”

— Nicole Krauss

141. “But we didn’t invent the idea of a single God; we only wrote a story of our struggle to remain true to Him and in doing so we invented ourselves. We gave ourselves a past and inscribed ourselves into the future.”

— Nicole Krauss

142. “It would mark the end of a year that he might look back on as hands, a pivot between two lines. Or not: maybe enough time, would pass that eventually he would look back on his life, all of it, as a series of events both logical and continuous.”

— Nicole Krauss

143. “Doesn’t part of the awe that fills us when we confront the unknown come from understanding that, should it at last flood into us and become known, we would be altered?”

— Nicole Krauss

144. “At the end, all that is left of you are your possessions.”

— Nicole Krauss

145. “The way Misha tells it, he drove like a blind man, giving the car almost full independence to feel its way along, bumping off things, only giving the wheel a spin with the tips of this fingers when the situation verged on life threatening.”

— Nicole Krauss

146. “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.”

— Nicole Krauss

147. “He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard.”

— Nicole Krauss

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

— Nicole Krauss

149. “Once or twice a year I attended the English Romantic conferences held throughout Europe, brief gatherings perhaps not dissimilar in feeling for the participants than the feeling Jews have when they get off the plane in Israel: the relief of at last being surrounded on all sides by your own kind – the relief and the horror.”

— Nicole Krauss

150. “Then one day I was looking out the window. Maybe I was contemplating the sky. Put even a fool in front of the window and you’ll get a Spinoza.”

— Nicole Krauss