Quote

Sometimes I get the feeling that we're just a bunch of habits. The gestures we repeat over and over, they're just our need to be recognized. Without them, we'd be unidentifiable. We have to reinvent ourselves every minute.

Nicole Krauss

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Nicole Krauss
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: August 18
Author
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Feelings
Recognized
Without
Repeats
Need
Habits
Sometimes
Minute
Needs
Bunch
Every
Habit
Reinvent
Minutes
Gestures
Feeling
Repeat

More quotes by Nicole Krauss

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Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.
Nicole Krauss
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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
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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 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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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 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
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The fact that you got a little happier today doesn't change the fact that you also became a little sadder. Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you're the happiest and saddest you've ever been in your whole life.
Nicole Krauss
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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.
Nicole Krauss
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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
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We met each other when we were young, before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.
Nicole Krauss
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There's no match for the silence of GOD.
Nicole Krauss
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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
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. . . I would have let him go one finger at a time, until, without his realizing, he'd be floating without me. And then I thought, perhaps that is what it means to be a [parent] - to teach your child to live without you.
Nicole Krauss
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I used to think that if I had a choice between writing well and living well, I would choose the former. But now I think that's sheer lunacy. Writing weighs so much less, in the great cosmic equation, than living.
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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If I had a camera,' I said, 'I'd take a picture of you every day. That way I'd remember how you looked every single day of your life.
Nicole Krauss
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For me, the most powerful way to write about something is through the absence of it. Rather than writing about what it was to become a new mother, I wrote, for example, a father facing death and addressing his estranged son about the regrets of his relationship.
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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I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in.
Nicole Krauss
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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.
Nicole Krauss