Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Nicole Krauss
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: August 18
Author
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Another
Loneliness
Impossibility
Reason
Solitude
Misunderstood
Human
Difficulty
Spokes
Humans
Aware
Spoke
Mind
Capable
Understands
Always
Poetry
Sophisticated
Grasps
Understanding
Absolutes
Straws
Comes
Absolute
Intrinsic

More quotes by Nicole Krauss

Image
When the word 'nostalgia' was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology - not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness.
Nicole Krauss
Image
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
Image
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.
Nicole Krauss
Image
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.
Nicole Krauss
Image
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.
Nicole Krauss
Image
There's no match for the silence of GOD.
Nicole Krauss
Image
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
Image
He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard [...]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.
Nicole Krauss
Image
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.
Nicole Krauss
Image
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
Image
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
Image
When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.
Nicole Krauss
Image
Even among the angels, there is the sadness of division.
Nicole Krauss
Image
I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.
Nicole Krauss
Image
...The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!
Nicole Krauss
Image
The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.
Nicole Krauss
Image
. . . 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
Image
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.
Nicole Krauss
Image
... as a rule of thumb, whenever there appears a plural, correct for a singular. Should I ever let slip a royal WE, put me out of my misery with a swift blow to the head.
Nicole Krauss
Image
We met each other when we were young, before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.
Nicole Krauss