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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.
Nicole Krauss
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Nicole Krauss
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: August 18
Author
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Always
Madness
Oneself
Inversely
Importance
Politeness
Words
Inclined
Use
Smiled
Mother
Manners
Back
Stands
Sometimes
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More quotes by Nicole Krauss
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
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
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
I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read.
Nicole Krauss
The book Forest Dark wants to provoke questions about what is reality and why are we so given to believe that reality is firm and unbendable. There's a whole host of questions that the book is asking about that. Why do we believe that the world is only one way and as we see it? Why are we not open to the ways in which it might be otherwise.
Nicole Krauss
I'm not immune to the readers' desires. Sometimes they are my own, because I'm a reader, too. The readers' desire to know what really happened and what didn't. To have a glimpse into what's really the author and what isn't. I think we all have that and I wonder about what it means.
Nicole Krauss
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
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.
Nicole Krauss
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
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.
Nicole Krauss
At night the sky is pure astronomy.
Nicole Krauss
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.
Nicole Krauss
There was no one to call me to bed, no one to demand that the rhythms of my life operate in a duet.
Nicole Krauss
...we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.
Nicole Krauss
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
That powers my desire to write: the sense of how quickly everything on the surface of life can be cut away and you can suddenly be inside the most inner part of the most inner life of a person. What does it feel like there, and what are the regrets and sensations and longings, and what is the music of it?
Nicole Krauss
Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.
Nicole Krauss
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.
Nicole Krauss
...The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!
Nicole Krauss
I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways that is what memory does as well.
Nicole Krauss
