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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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Nicole Krauss
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: August 18
Author
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Needs
Stranger
Things
Kindness
Worse
Source
Realizing
Times
Realizes
Makes
Strangers
Need
Badly

More quotes by 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.
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At night the sky is pure astronomy.
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One is always changing. I don't want to write the same book and I couldn't, because I'm a different person.
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There's no match for the silence of GOD.
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I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.
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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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Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.
Nicole Krauss
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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
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How was it possible to wake up every day and be recognizable to another when so often one was barely recognizable to oneself?
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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.
Nicole Krauss
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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
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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
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To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that cold be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame.
Nicole Krauss
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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
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There is a fallacy that the powerful emotion of youth mellows with time. Not true. One learns to control and suppress it. But it doesn't lessen. It simply hides and concentrates itself in more discreet places. When one accidentally stumbles into one of these abysses, the pain is spectacular.
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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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
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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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To hike out alone in the desert to sleep on the valley floor on a night with no moon, in the pitch black, just listening to the boom of silence: you can't imagine what that's like.
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