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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.

Nicole Krauss

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Nicole Krauss
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: August 18
Author
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
World
Two
Seven
Languages
Ends
Took
Spoken
Nothing
Side
Touching
Years
Sides
Opened
Make
Came
Stomach
Shins
Would
Nice
Girlfriend
Calf
Think
Known
Mouth
Calves
Thinking
Language
Mouths
Ribs

More quotes by Nicole Krauss

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He died alone because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone.
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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.
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Empty teacups gathered around her and dictionary pages fell at her feet.
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Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first.
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After she left everything fell apart. No Jew was safe. There were rumors of unfathomable things, and because we couldn't fathom them we failed to believe them, until we had no choice and it was too late. p 8
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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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At night the sky is pure astronomy.
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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.
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Life in general in my experience gets deeper and deeper, more and more profound, more and more complex, the older one gets.
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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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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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I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways that is what memory does as well.
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I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw us to literature is that it gives us this very attractive illusion that there is meaning in the world - things connect.
Nicole Krauss
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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.
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
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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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We move through the day like two hands of a clock: sometimes we overlap for a moment, then come apart again, carrying on alone. Everyday exactly the same: the tea, the burnt toast, the crumbs, the silence.
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In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.
Nicole Krauss
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... 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
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What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I'd say it's this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.
Nicole Krauss