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27f9eb1
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Once my father told me: When a Jew prays, he is asking God a question that has no end. Darkness fell. Rain fell. I never asked: What question? And now it's too late. Because I lost you, Tateh. One day, in the spring of 1938, on a rainy day that gave way to a break in the clouds, I lost you. You'd gone out to collect specimens for a theory you were hatching about rainfall, instinct, and butterflies. And then you were gone. We found you lying..
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Nicole Krauss |
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0132c4f
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There's no match for the silence of GOD.
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Nicole Krauss |
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dd937dc
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left to my own devices, I'm content to wake myself with a fart.
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Nicole Krauss |
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8dc8cee
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You hear a sound and it's truth turning in its grave.
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Nicole Krauss |
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f895730
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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0ae08db
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Once, at the peak of our shouting, Bird took a deep breath. At the top of his lungs, he shrieked: "I! HAVE NOT! BEEN! UNHAPPY! MY WHOLE! LIFE!" "But you're only seven," I said."
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Nicole Krauss |
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7fe02cb
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These things are lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone taking the time to write it all down. That Litvinoff had a wife who was so devoted is, to be frank, the only reason anyone knows anything about him at all.
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loss
love
wife
husband
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Nicole Krauss |
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f86be2d
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This is why the rabbis tell us that a broken heart is more full than one that is content: because a broken heart has a vacancy, and the vacancy has the potential to be filled with the infinite.
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Nicole Krauss |
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22c8253
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Metti chiunque, anche uno scemo, davanti a una finestra, e avrai uno Spinoza.
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Nicole Krauss |
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d19e157
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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72316be
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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e644522
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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 i..
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Nicole Krauss |
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baf0bbe
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By heart, this is not an expression I use lightly. My heart is weak and unreliable.
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Nicole Krauss |
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afc3192
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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.
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time
perspective
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Nicole Krauss |
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45aa45a
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But then a foreboding thought cast a shadow over the rest, blunt and unadorned, and it was simply this: that for most of my life i had been emulating the thoughts and actions of other people. That so much I had done or said had been a mirror of what was said and done around me. And that if i continued in this manner, whatever glimmers of brilliant life still burned in me would soon go out. When i was very young it had been otherwise, but I ..
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Nicole Krauss |
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ce8b454
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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."
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Nicole Krauss |
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d1cafa0
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23. OUTSIDE, IT WAS STILL COMING DOWN
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Nicole Krauss |
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9fc6d79
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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f22ef5c
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The malpractice for advice-giving is like five times as much as a craniotomy.
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counseling
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Nicole Krauss |
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65e0530
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And he isn't crying for her, not for his grandma, he's crying for himself: that he: too, is going to die one day. And before that his friends wil die, and the friends of his friends, and, as time passes, the children of his friends, and, if his fate is truly bitter, his own children. (58)
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sad
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Nicole Krauss |
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831566a
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to survive the dark and often terrifying passage of my life I came to believe certain thing about myself . . . I simply came to believe that one, factual circumstances of my life were almost accidental and didn't grow out of my own sould, and two, I possessed something unique, a special strength and depth of feeling that would allow me to withstand the hurt and injustice without being broken by it.
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Nicole Krauss |
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13e7ff8
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Why is it that there was always a unit on history, math, science and god knows what other useless, totally forgettable information you taught those seventh graders year after year, but never any unit on death? No exercises, no workbooks, no final exams on the only subject that matters?
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Nicole Krauss |
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9ed632d
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Better to try and fail than not to try at all
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Nicole Krauss |
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7929909
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The power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is. As such, I've never bought into the idea that the writer requires any special ritual in order to write. If need be, I could write almost anywhere, as easily in an ashram as in a crowded cafe, or so I've always insisted when asked whether I write with a pen or a computer, at morning or night, alone or surrounded, in a saddle like Goethe, standing like ..
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Nicole Krauss |
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826f4ca
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I was considered attractive in those days, some people even called me beautiful, though my skin was never good and it was this that I noticed when I looked in the mirror
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Nicole Krauss |
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436964f
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There's a hurried intensity in the strokes--you can see where he scratched into the wet paint with the end of the brush. It's as if he knew there wasn't much time left. And yet, there's a serenity in his face, a sense of something that's survived its own ruin.
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Nicole Krauss |
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765c8e9
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The idea of being weighed down made me uneasy, as if I lived on the surface of a frozen lake and each new trapping of domestic life - a pot, a chair, a lamp - threatened to be the thing that sent me through the ice. The only exception was books, which I acquired freely, because I never really felt they belonged to me. Because of this, I never felt compelled to finish those I didn't like, or even a pressure to like them at all. But a certain..
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Nicole Krauss |
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60c05e8
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I helped those in, who were locked out, others i helped keep out, what couldn't be let in, so that they could sleep without nightmares.
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Nicole Krauss |
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7218396
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Tova, che si stoeshe po tsial den po pizhama vk'shchi i prevezhdashe knigi, predimno ot m'rtvi avtori, ne pomagashe osobeno. Poniakoga s chasove se zanimavashe s edno izrechenie, obikaliashe kato kuche s kokal, nakraia izrevavashe: IZMISLIKh GO! i iztichvashe do biuroto da izkopae dupka i da go zarovi.
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Nicole Krauss |
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2082043
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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d0da62f
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I though, So this is how they send the angel. Stalled at the age when she loved you most.
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love-quotes
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Nicole Krauss |
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15b2aa4
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A wave of nausea came over me. And yet. Sometimes you need a stroke of genius and, lo and behold, genius comes and strokes you
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Nicole Krauss |
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f85b7af
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The kiss stayed there with no place to go, no sensory reserve that could absorb it and file it away as a common act of intimacy, a thousand times received. He knew what Anna was asking: whether you could love someone without habits.
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love
memory
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Nicole Krauss |
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3d2db50
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The first woman may have been Eve, but the first girl will always be Alma. 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 t..
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the-one
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Nicole Krauss |
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d301a2d
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I knew that to find and to feel Yoav again would be terribly painful, because of what had become of him, and because of what I knew he could ignite in me, a vitality that was excruciating because like a flare it lit up the emptiness inside me and exposed what I always secretly knew about myself: how much time I'd spent being only partly alive, and how easily I'd accepted a lesser life.
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Nicole Krauss |
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5a5bc98
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Erase una vez un nino que amaba a una nina, y la risa de ella era como una pregunta que el queria pasar la vida contestando
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Nicole Krauss |
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ead7409
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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?
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Nicole Krauss |
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ef23425
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He couldn't have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life. This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on th..
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reading
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Nicole Krauss |
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0a07e3d
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As the rifles were pointed at his chest he wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard. He had thought the possibilities of human silence were endless. But as the bullets tore from the rifles, his body was riddled with the truth. And a small part of him laughed bitterly because, anyway, how could he have forgotten what he had always known: There's no match for the silence of God.
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Nicole Krauss |
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38cc531
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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.
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marriage
love
sleeping-together
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Nicole Krauss |
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5427b16
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No, I don't harbor any mystical ideas about writing, Your Honor, it's work like any other kind of craft; the power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is.
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Nicole Krauss |
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340913a
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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.
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Nicole Krauss |
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a973035
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I made a point of answering the question I received with some frequency from journalists, Do you think books can change people's lives? (which really meant, Do you actually think anything you could write could mean anything to anyone?), with a little airtight thought experiment in which I asked the interviewer to imagine the sort of person he might be if all of the literature he'd read in his life were somehow excised from his mind, his min..
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Nicole Krauss |
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f6b836a
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The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.
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memory-loss
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Nicole Krauss |