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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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Nicole Krauss
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: August 18
Author
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
People
Talk
Family
Didn
Form
Evasion
Many
Solitary
Much
Exist
Way
Silence
Things
Simply

More quotes by 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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And if the man who once upon a time had been a boy who promised he'd never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise, it wasn't because he was stubborn or even loyal. He couldn't help it.
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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.
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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.
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I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.
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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.
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I have a very strong sense of architecture in my novels. But at first it's sometimes like building a doorknob before you have a door, and a door before you have a room.
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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.
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There was no one to call me to bed, no one to demand that the rhythms of my life operate in a duet.
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At the most simplistic level physicists tell us that what we see as reality is not actually accurate. A rock looks solid to us but it's full of empty space and atoms moving and we see it as solid because we need to because it helps us survive, right? Survival being our goal. You can extrapolate that to many other things.
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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.
Nicole Krauss
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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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Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.
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At night the sky is pure astronomy.
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That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.
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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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.
Nicole Krauss
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She struggled with her sadness, but tried to conceal it, to divide it into smaller and smaller parts and scatter these in places she thought no one would find them.
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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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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