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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.

Nicole Krauss

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Nicole Krauss
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: August 18
Author
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Literature
Boiled
Read
Engage
Means
Sentence
Human
Sentences
Humans
Endless
Mean
Healing
Really
Conversation
Single

More quotes by Nicole Krauss

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In one's youth, one has tremendous access to one's feelings. And as one gets older, some of those feelings kind of drift away. But so much more happens to you. There's more at stake in life.
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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And it's like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway across the world, only this was the opposite of disaster, how by accident she saved me with that thoughtless act of grace, and she never knew, and how that, too, is the part of the history of love.
Nicole Krauss
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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.
Nicole Krauss
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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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...larger than life...I've never understood that expression. What's larger than life?
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
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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.
Nicole Krauss
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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.
Nicole Krauss
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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.
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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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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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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In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.
Nicole Krauss
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And so he did the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away.
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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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
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Perhaps that is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you.
Nicole Krauss
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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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The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.
Nicole Krauss