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6355237
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He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood.
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Nicole Krauss |
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bf2692e
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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0814ed1
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You fall in love, it's intoxicating, an for a little while you feel like you've actually become one with the other person. Merged souls, and so on. You think you'll never be lonely again. Only it doesn't last and soon you realize you can only get so close and you end up brutally disappointed, more alone than ever, because the illusion-the hope you'd held on to all those years-has been shattered.
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loneliness
love
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Nicole Krauss |
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a5a5119
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During the Age of Glass, everyone believed some part of him or her to be extremely fragile. For some it was a hand, for others a femur, yet others believed it was their noses that were made of glass. The Age of Glass followed the Stone Age as an evolutionary corrective, introducing into human relations a new sense of fragility that fostered compassion. This period lasted a relatively short time in the history of love-about a century-until a..
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Nicole Krauss |
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8d8bca7
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After that day when I saw the elephant, I let myself see more and believe more. It was a game I played with myself. When I told Alma the things I saw she would laugh and tell me she loved my imagination. For her I changed pebbles into diamonds, shoes into mirrors, I changed glass into water, I gave her wings and pulled birds from her ears and in her pockets she found the feathers, I asked a pear to become a pineapple, a pineapple to become ..
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Nicole Krauss |
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bcbd232
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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.
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reading
life
love
everyday-life
write
movies
thinking
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Nicole Krauss |
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a78522a
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I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.
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failure
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Nicole Krauss |
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74baae1
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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cea7f15
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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aa97106
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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.
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people
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Nicole Krauss |
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15543d2
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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a1a65ae
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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e61c537
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Perhaps that is what it means to be a father-to teach your child to live without you.
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Nicole Krauss |
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b03298f
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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.
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literature
reading
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Nicole Krauss |
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b7fdf61
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Once upon a time, there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered and everything was possible. A stick could be a sword. A pebble could be a diamond. A tree was a castle. Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a house across the field from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was the Queen and he was the King. In th..
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Nicole Krauss |
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5815e14
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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0ff1206
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He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it.
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Nicole Krauss |
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0a63723
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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 empty.
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writing
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Nicole Krauss |
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e046dfc
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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a5f0ace
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When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit
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romance
love
obituary
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Nicole Krauss |
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47e87e6
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Tell me, was I the sort of person who took your elbow when cars passed on the street, touched your cheek while you talked, combed your wet hair, stopped by the side of the road in the country to point out certain constellations, standing behind you so that you had the advantage of leaning and looking up?
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Nicole Krauss |
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e07a868
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Now we'd known each other for two years, the side of my calf was touching his shins, and his stomach was against my ribs. He said, "I don't think it's end of world to be my girlfriend." 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."
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Nicole Krauss |
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38a73c5
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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6f5eea6
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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248cd67
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The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces.
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Nicole Krauss |
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1d2b026
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after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?
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Nicole Krauss |
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fb19285
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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fd3e009
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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90c5358
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Don't you see?" I said. "He could change every detail, but he couldn't change her." "But why?" His obtuseness frustrated me. "Because he was in love with her!" I said. "Because, to him, she was the only thing that was real."
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Nicole Krauss |
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45859f9
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we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.
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Nicole Krauss |
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3304294
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It's strange what the heart can do when the mind is giving the directions.
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Nicole Krauss |
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e9a9be0
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How was it possible to wake up every day and be recognizable to another when so often one was barely recognizable to oneself?
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Nicole Krauss |
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160b6c6
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There are so many ways to be alive, but only one way to be dead.
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Nicole Krauss |
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ed556c0
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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. When they were ten he asked her to marry him. When they were eleven he kissed her for the first time... For her sixteenth birthday he gave her an English dictionary and together they learned the words.
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Nicole Krauss |
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42f65a6
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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eacbae4
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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 - 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 much less. It's not th..
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Nicole Krauss |
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7c78f4a
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THE DEATH OF LEOPOLD GURSKY Leopold Gursky started dying on August 18, 1920. He died learning to walk. He died standing at the blackboard. And once, also, carrying a heavy tray. He died practicing a new way to sign his name. Opening a window. Washing his genitals in the bath. He died alone, because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone. Or he died thinking about Alma. Or when he chose not to.
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Nicole Krauss |
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2bfed29
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When you are 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 clear that impassable distance between you." [...] "I don't know. If being in love only made people more lonely, why would everyone want it so much?" "Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it's intoxicating, and for a little while you feel like you've actually become one with the other p..
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love
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Nicole Krauss |
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7a89229
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I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.
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Nicole Krauss |
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ee43a68
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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7b08216
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Then I turned the page and at the top it said THINGS I MISS ABOUT M and there was a list of 15 things, and the first was THE WAY HE HOLDS THINGS. I did not understand how you can miss the way somebody holds things.
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love
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Nicole Krauss |
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b978a02
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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86c8475
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To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and by name, and then to know it with your eyes closed so that when something is gone, it can be recognized by the shape of its absence. So that you can continue to possess the lost, because absence is the only constant thing. Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been.
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Nicole Krauss |
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7a6f0cf
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But see, the incredible thing about people is that we forget," Ray continued. "Time passes and somehow the hope creeps back and sooner or later someone else comes along all over again. We go through our lives like that, and either we just accept the lesser relationship -- it may not be total understanding, but it's pretty good -- or we keep trying for the perfect union, trying and failing, leaving behind us a trail of broken hearts, our own..
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Nicole Krauss |