Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Nicole Krauss
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: August 18
Author
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Love
Detail
Frustrated
Details
Couldn
Change
Real
Thing
Every

More quotes by Nicole Krauss

Image
...The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!
Nicole Krauss
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways that is what memory does as well.
Nicole Krauss
Image
Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.
Nicole Krauss
Image
He died alone because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone.
Nicole Krauss
Image
Sometimes I forget that the world is not on the same schedule as I. That everything is not dying, or that if it is dying it will return to life, what with a little sun and the usual encouragement.
Nicole Krauss
Image
I walked down my snow covered street. Out of habit I turned and checked for my footsteps. When I arrived at my building I looked for my name on the buzzers. And because I know that sometimes I see things that aren't there, after dinner I called Information to ask if I was listed.(25)
Nicole Krauss
Image
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
Image
How was it possible to wake up every day and be recognizable to another when so often one was barely recognizable to oneself?
Nicole Krauss
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think in the whole field of questions about what we take to be real, one of those questions is about the self. When you talk about the self we're always talking about whether it's a construction and it's a construction we're always in the process of working on. I don't think that work ever ends, to some degree.
Nicole Krauss
Image
What interests me very much as a writer is the ability for writing to have our lives to be occupied so vividly by others. I think that's what we long for as writers.
Nicole Krauss
Image
. . . 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.
Nicole Krauss
Image
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
Image
He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it.
Nicole Krauss
Image
Then he almost but didn't say the two sentence he'd been meaning to say for years: part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you
Nicole Krauss
Image
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
Image
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