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aa64b4d
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So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and 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: IwasabeautifulgirlPleasedon'tgoItoobelievemybodyismadeofglassI'veneverlovedanyoneIthinkofmyselfasfunnyForgiveme....
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Nicole Krauss |
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67f37c2
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I continued to sit there hour after hour watching the unrelenting rain slosh against the glass, thinking of our life together, Lotte's and mine, how everything in it was designed to give a sense of permanence, the chair against the wall that was there when we went to sleep and there again when we awoke, the little habits that quoted from the day before and predicted the day to come, though in truth it was all just an illusion, just as solid..
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Nicole Krauss |
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123561a
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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
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Nicole Krauss |
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482f205
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Our kiss was niticlimactic. It wasn't that the kiss was bad, but it was just a note of punctuation in our long conversation, a parenthetical remark made in order to assure each other of a deeply felt agreement, a mutual offer of companionship, which is so much more rare than sexual passion or even love.
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Nicole Krauss |
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bc7e77a
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There was no one to call me to bed, no one to demand that the rhythms of my life operate in a duet.
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Nicole Krauss |
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99c9350
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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7ba5591
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He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard.
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Nicole Krauss |
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a794ded
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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. I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back...And to be honest: I wasn't really angry. Not anymore. I had left my anger somewhere long ago. Put it down on a park..
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Nicole Krauss |
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63b3576
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19. THE WALL OF DICTIONARIES BETWEEN MY MOTHER AND THE WORLD GETS TALLER EVERY YEAR Sometimes pages of the dictionaries come loose and gather at her feet, shallon, shalop, shallot, shallow, shalom, sham, shaman, shamble, like the petals of an immense flower. When I was little, I thought that the pages on the floor were words she would never be able to use again, and I tried to tape them back in where they belonged, out of fear that one day ..
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Nicole Krauss |
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cf177eb
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There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes matter worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger.
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Nicole Krauss |
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5db9e32
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The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.
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the-self
self
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Nicole Krauss |
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08ff59b
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When you're young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close-as close as you can get-to another person only makes it clear the impassable distance between you.
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youth
love
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Nicole Krauss |
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529a6dc
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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. Sometimes I think: I am older than this tree, older than this bench, older than the rain. And yet. I'm not older than the rain. It's been falling for years and after I go it will keep on falling.
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Nicole Krauss |
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3211b83
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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1c6a34e
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I walked down my snow covered street. Out of habit I turned and checked for my footsteps. When I arrived at my building I looked for my name on the buzzers. And because I know that sometimes I see things that aren't there, after dinner I called Information to ask if I was listed.(25)
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Nicole Krauss |
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e65b924
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Because it hardly ends with falling in love. Just the opposite. I don't need to tell you, Your Honor, I sense that you understand true loneliness. How you fall in love and it's there that the work begins: day after day, year after year, you must dig yourself up, exhume the contents of your mind and sould for the other to sift through so that you might be known to him, and you, too, must spend days and years wading through all that he excava..
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love
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Nicole Krauss |
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115f90d
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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
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Nicole Krauss |
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74e0be0
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All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen.
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Nicole Krauss |
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b051c26
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I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)
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life
sad
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Nicole Krauss |
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df76e7c
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It is impossible to distrust one's writing without awakening a deeper distrust in oneself.
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Nicole Krauss |
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903a102
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I had the elated, otherworldly feeling I sometimes get entering the sphere of another's life, when for a moment changing my banal habits and living like seems entirely possible, a feeling that always dissolves by the next morning, when I wake up to the familiar, unmovable shapes of my own life.
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Nicole Krauss |
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3065c14
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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17af801
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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.
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writing
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Nicole Krauss |
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a6198eb
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our eyes locked in one of those looks that sometimes happen between strangers, when both wordlessly agree that reality contains sinkholes whose depths neither can ever hope to fathom.
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Nicole Krauss |
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ba6654a
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A couple months after my heart attack, fifty-seven years after I'd given it up, I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.
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Nicole Krauss |
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fb7e94a
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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. I wondered whether what I was experiencing was some sort of psychotic break, the sort that ambushes a person who until then has lived an ordinary life, auguring a new existence full of torment and struggle.
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psychosis
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Nicole Krauss |
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8324f8e
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I filled the sink with soapy water and washed the dirty pots. And with each pot and pan, and spoon I put away,I also put away a thought I couldn't bear until my kitchen and my mind returned to a state of mutual organisation.
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Nicole Krauss |
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0ae8fb4
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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65ef072
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Once upon a time a boy loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.
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nicole krauss |
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2bfa2dc
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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
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Nicole Krauss |
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59c906e
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It took almost an hour to get to Bernard's house. Somewhere in Long Island. Beautiful trees. I'd never seen such beautiful trees. Out in the driveway, one of Bernard's nephews had slit his pants legs to the knee and was running up and down in the sunlight, watching how they caught the breeze. Inside the house, people stood around a table piled with food talking about Isaac. I knew I didn't belong there. I felt like a fool and an imposter. I..
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Nicole Krauss |
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b64913e
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Having begun to feel, people's desire to feel grew. They wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how it sometimes hurt. People became addicted to feeling. They struggled to uncover new emotions.
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feelings
life
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Nicole Krauss |
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e940797
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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..
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self-knowledge
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Nicole Krauss |
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9c98e5e
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I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.
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Nicole Krauss |
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fe8dbde
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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c0634a4
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Narrative cannot sustain formlessness any more than light can sustain darkness - it is the antithesis of formlessness, and so it can never truly communicate it. Chaos is the one truth that narrative must always betray, for in the creation of its delicate structures that reveal many truths about life, the portion of truth that has to do with incoherence and disorder must be obscured. More and more, it had felt to me that in the things I wrot..
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Nicole Krauss |
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e332786
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So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves.
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words
silence
language
speech
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Nicole Krauss |
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f1ebc68
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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416933f
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The air felt different in my lungs. The world no longer looked the same. You change and then you change again. You become a dog, a bird, a plant that always leans to the left. 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 in the night it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it.
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grief
loss
love-hurts
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Nicole Krauss |
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7358a75
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In the days after my heart attack & before I began to write again, all I could think about was dying. I'd been spared again, and only after the danger had passed did I allow my thoughts to unravel to their inevitable end. I imagined all the ways I could go. Blood clot to the brain. Infarction. Thrombosis. Pneumonia. Grand mal obstruction to the vena cava. I saw myself foaming at the mouth, writhing on the floor. I'd wake up in the night, gr..
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Nicole Krauss |
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0856dc4
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The misery of other people is only an abstraction [...] something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence.
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experiences
loneliness
misery
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Nicole Krauss |
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cc11421
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I often wonder who will be the last person to see me alive. If I had to bet, it would be on the delivery boy from the Chinese take-out. I order in four nights out of seven. Whenever he comes I make a big production of finding my wallet. He stands in the door holding the greasy bag while I wonder if this is the night I'll finish off my spring roll, climb into bed, and have a heart attack in my sleep.
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Nicole Krauss |
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6043a40
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The woman who later became his wife was sleeping in his bed, her face buried in the pillows and her feet crossed on top of each other like a child's. He watched her sleep and struggled to see her as she was, but what he saw instead were her muscles and bones. He saw right through the skin to where her femur connected to her tibia by way of the ligaments, to the hair web of nerves and the delicate forest of her lungs, to the abstract heart p..
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death
life
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Nicole Krauss |
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6a38dc0
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I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back. We were locked in a stare of mutual disgust.
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Nicole Krauss |