|
3e995ca
|
Daniel was twenty-three, a year younger than I was, and though he hadn't yet published a book of poems he seemed to have spent his time better, or more imaginatively, or maybe what could be said is that he felt a pressure to go places, meet people, and experience things that, whenever I have encountered it in someone, has always made me envious.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
9586840
|
At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same, and that when my book ended I'd end, a great wind would sweep through my rooms carrying the pages away , and when the air cleared of all of those fluttering white sheets the room would be silent, the chair where I sat would be empty.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
c50cd42
|
9. Nhung gi dien ra sau do la nhung nam hanh phuc nhat trong doi ho Ho song trong mot can nha tran ngap anh nang co hoa giay phu tren mai o Ramat Gan. Cha toi trong mot cay o liu, mot cay chanh trong vuon va dao quanh moi cay mot ranh nho de nuoc chay vao. Ban dem ho nghe am nhac My qua chiec dai song ngan cua ong. Khi cac cua so mo va gio thoi dung huong, ho co the thay huong vi cua bien. Cuoi cung ho lam le cuoi tren bai bien o Tel Aviv, ..
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
b2ca8d6
|
Sometimes, reading to my children at night, the perverse thought would come to me that in rehashing for them the same fairy stories, Bible stories, and myths, I was not giving them a gift but rather taking something from them. Night after night i was instructing them in convention. Here are the various forms life can take, I was telling them. And yet i still remembered the time when my older son's mind did not produce known forms or follow ..
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
bd2973f
|
That was the end of my search to find someone that would make my mother happy again. 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 in, even if no one else could.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
5abe298
|
She was one of a group of girls he'd observed bloom from scraggly weeds into tropical beauties who churned the air around them into a dense humidity.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
7c07541
|
One is always in the hold of the world, but one doesn't physically feel it's hold, doesn't account for its effect. Cannot draw comfort from the hold of the world, which registers only as a neutral emptiness. But the sea one feels. And so surrounded, so steadily held, so gently rocked - so differently organized - one's thoughts come in another form.
|
|
sea
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
939900f
|
No one ever inhabited the threshold more thoroughly than Kafka. On the threshold of happiness; of the beyond; of Canaan; of the door only open for us. On the threshold of escape, of transformation. Of an enormous and final understanding. No one made so much art of it. And yet if Kafka is never sinister or nihilistic, it's because to even reach the threshold requires a susceptibility to hope and vivid yearning. There is a door. There's a way..
|
|
kafka
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
1b2b8a3
|
Once, coming out of the cool, dark lab into the heat of the desert sun, he'd briefly wondered if the emptiness he'd been so staunchly guarding was, not the absence of memory, but actually a memory itself: a recollection of the blazing white potential that had existed before he was born. The emptiness an infant possesses in the very first moments, when consciousness begins like the answer to a question never asked.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
6593c4a
|
Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist. There are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written, or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom, or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges, and absorbs the impact.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
e8dc1f3
|
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'tgoItoobelievemybodyismadeof glassI'veneverlovedanyoneIthinkofmyselfasfunnyForgive me . . .
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
bf24b5f
|
Over and over, I read the pages of the book I'd written as a young man. It was so long ago. I was naive. A twenty-year-old in love. A swollen heart and I had to match. I thought I could do anything. Strange as that may seem, now that I've done all I'm going to do.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
ea0c303
|
There were other refugees around him experiencing the same fears and helplessness, but Litvinoff didn't find any comfort in this because there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone. Litvinoff preferred to be alone.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
f974ccf
|
But as I remember it, he looked alternately bored and preoccupied throughout the meal, as if, while one part of him was drinking Bordeaux and cutting his food into bite-sized morsels, the other half was engaged with shepherding a herd of goats across a bone-dry plain.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
ff91cb9
|
Perhaps that is what it means to be a father-to teach your child to live without you. If so, no one was a greater father than I.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
28b70e4
|
A place belongs to anyone who has a use for it.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
b607d83
|
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 0 if you find yourself at a loss for what to do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness 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. It's no..
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
7596570
|
There were certain places he always seemed to return to, squares or street corners, like refrains, points of convergence where the city doubled back on itself before escaping again around the corner.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
2ab7b63
|
The city hurt to look at, all angles and glints of sun like shattered glass.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
007ad46
|
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 |
|
b8bdaff
|
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 soul 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 excavates for you alone, the archaeology of his being, how exhausting it became, the digging up and the wading through, while my own work, my true work, l..
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
ad93839
|
I danced the only way I knew how to dance: for life, crashing into the chairs, and spinning until I fell, so that I could get up and dance again, until dawn broke and found my prostrate on the floor, so close to death I could spit into it and whisper: L'chaim.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
00edaef
|
But in the end, it isn't up to the writer to decide how his or her work will be used.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
17c8143
|
He trusted her because she cared for him and there was no one else.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
7581d62
|
The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
f44c202
|
You know, sometimes I get the feeling that we're just a bunch of habits," she said. "The gestures we repeat over and over, they're just our need to be recognized." Her eyes were fixed on the TV, as if she was reading subtitles. I mean that without them we would be unidentifiable. We'd have to reinvent ourselves every minute."
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
132400f
|
And if the man who once upon a time had never 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. And having hidden for three and a half years, hiding his love for a son who didn't know he existed didn't seem unthinkable. Not if it was what the only woman he would ever love needed him to do. After all, what does it mean ..
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
925debe
|
Who's that woman?" Samson asked, sitting in the chair the doctor motioned to. "Who?" "In the hall, like she's possessed." "Marietta? She has Tourette's, a very severe case. It makes her tic like that. She has an overpowering impulse to mimic whatever she sees." Lavell lifted a stubby finger and rubbed his eyebrow. "A colleague of mine, smart guy, wrote a case study of her. Whether the individual Marietta truly exists or if the impulses, so..
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
903749d
|
Nicole Krauss "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, The History of Love tags: love 8241 likes"
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
c1fde52
|
there was stored substrata along
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
2e1fcf7
|
When my sons asked the reason for my trip, I said that I needed to conduct research for my book. What is it about? the younger one asked. He was constantly writing stories, as many as three a day, and would not have been troubled by such a question concerning his own writing. For a long time he'd spelled the words as he thought they might be spelled, without any spaces between them, which, like the Torah's unbroken string of letters, opened..
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
09825c9
|
What I lost is, in the grand scope of things, almost... negligible. It's true that there's grief: it wakes me in a cold sweat thinking,, Who was I? What did I care about? What did I find funny sad, stupid, painful? Was I happy? All of those memories I accumulated, gone. Which one, if there could have been only one, would I have kept?
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
cbabddd
|
I don't know what to say about it, except that it moved me in a way one hopes to be moved each time he begins a book.
|
|
reading
books
history-of-love
nicole-krauss
book
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
ad4cf6e
|
Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.
|
|
romantic
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
76c21c4
|
Maybe this is how I'll go, in a fit of laughter, what could be better, laughing and crying, laughing and singing, laughing so as to forget that I am alone, that it is the end of my life, that death is waiting outside the door for me.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
6dd3e88
|
It took seven languages to make me; it would have been nice if I could have spoken just one. But I couldn't, so he leaned down and kissed me.
|
|
love
languages
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
eebc4f3
|
Why do people always have to be named after dead people? If they had 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...?
|
|
permanence
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
82abe2b
|
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.
|
|
location
map
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
67ad942
|
I danced the only way I knew how to dance: for life, crashing into the chairs, and spinning until I fell, so that I could get up and dance again, until dawn broke and found me prostrate on the floor, so close to death that I could spit into it and whisper: L'chaim.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
095bec4
|
FROM THE AIR there seems to be a system: recognizable designs, networks on the desert floor. Crosshatches of ridge and fissure. Lines that fan out from the source. The shadow of the airplane slips across basin and range. Frost forms between the plane's double windows, each geometric crystal an argument for the stillborn beauty of pure math. Eventually the cut of a road appears, as deep as a fossil in shale. Unbound by destination, a road si..
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
c4fa3d5
|
His memory had abandoned him, and though he had searched within himself all these weeks, he could find no desire to have it returned. If it came back now, he felt he would turn it away, and the knowledge of this renouncement, a small act of defiance, gave him a feeling of liberty.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
e6ad18e
|
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.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
16773f1
|
At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same, that when my book ended I'd end, a great wind would sweep through my rooms carrying the pages away, and when the air cleared of all those fluttering white sheets the room would be silent, the chair where I sat would be empty.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |
|
c7aa634
|
All I want is not to die on a day I went unseen.
|
|
|
Nicole Krauss |