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...larger than life...I've never understood that expression. What's larger than life?

Nicole Krauss

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Nicole Krauss
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: August 18
Author
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Life
Larger
Understood
Expression
Never

More quotes by Nicole Krauss

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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.
Nicole Krauss
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. . . she gave him one of those broad smiles she reserved for strangers, as if she were aware of being able to pass, in their eyes, for an ordinary woman.
Nicole Krauss
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David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I've ever read. [To the End of the Land is] powerful, shattering, and unflinching. To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence.
Nicole Krauss
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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 Queen and he was King. In the autumn light, her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls. When the sky grew dark they parted with leaves in their hair.
Nicole Krauss
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For me, what I am making in the novel is a place to live. When I first switched from poetry to novels, I was asked why, and the metaphor I came up with was about poems as rooms. You can make a room perfect, but then you have to shut the door and never go back, whereas a novel is like a house - it can never be perfect, but you can make a life in it.
Nicole Krauss
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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.
Nicole Krauss
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At night the sky is pure astronomy.
Nicole Krauss
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In one's youth, one has tremendous access to one's feelings. And as one gets older, some of those feelings kind of drift away. But so much more happens to you. There's more at stake in life.
Nicole Krauss
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There is a fallacy that the powerful emotion of youth mellows with time. Not true. One learns to control and suppress it. But it doesn't lessen. It simply hides and concentrates itself in more discreet places. When one accidentally stumbles into one of these abysses, the pain is spectacular.
Nicole Krauss
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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
Nicole Krauss
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ONE THING I AM NEVER GOING TO DO WHEN I GROW UP Is fall in love, drop out of college, learn to subsist on water and air, have a species named after me, and ruin my life.
Nicole Krauss
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I try to make a point of being seen. Sometimes when I'm out, I'll buy a juice even when I'm not thirsty. If the store is crowded I'll even go so far as dropping change all over the floor, nickels and dimes skidding in every direction. All I want is not to die on a day I went unseen.
Nicole Krauss
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Then he almost but didn't say the two sentence he'd been meaning to say for years: part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you
Nicole Krauss
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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.
Nicole Krauss
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There's no match for the silence of GOD.
Nicole Krauss
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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.
Nicole Krauss
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The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.
Nicole Krauss
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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?
Nicole Krauss
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...we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.
Nicole Krauss
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Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.
Nicole Krauss