Quote

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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Nicole Krauss
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: August 18
Author
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Break
Waiting
Find
Fissure
Tents
Pitch
Search
Patterns
Wait

More quotes by Nicole Krauss

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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.
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For her I changed pebbles into diamonds, shoes into mirrors, I changed glass into water, I gave her wings and pulled birds from her ears and in her pockets she found the feathers, I asked a pear to become a pineapple, a pineapple to become a lightbulb, a lightbulb to become the moon, and the moon to become a coin I flipped for her love.
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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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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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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
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Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.
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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You can't imagine how hard I am on myself. Nothing pummels me like my own doubts, the feeling of how far I still have to go.
Nicole Krauss
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Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.
Nicole Krauss
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Even among the angels, there is the sadness of division.
Nicole Krauss
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There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes things worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger.
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The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you're left with is your ambition.
Nicole Krauss
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There were many things they simply didn't talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family.
Nicole Krauss
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I feel really strongly about not wanting to overly guide the reader about what he or she should think. I really trust the reader to know for themselves and not to need too much. You have your own imagination, your own experiences, your own feelings, and a novel wants ultimately to ask questions. It doesn't assert anything, or shouldn't, I think.
Nicole Krauss
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Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I'd been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it.
Nicole Krauss
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Sometimes I thought about nothing and sometimes I thought about my life. At least I made a living. What kind of living? A living. It wasn't easy. I found out how little is unbearable.
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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All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist
Nicole Krauss
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Our kiss was niticlimactic. It wasn't that the kiss was bad, but it was just a note of punctuation in our long conversation, a parenthetical remark made in order to assure each other of a deeply felt agreement, a mutual offer of companionship, which is so much more rare than sexual passion or even love.
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