Quote

We move through the day like two hands of a clock: sometimes we overlap for a moment, then come apart again, carrying on alone. Everyday exactly the same: the tea, the burnt toast, the crumbs, the silence.

Nicole Krauss

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Nicole Krauss
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: August 18
Author
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Moment
Tea
Moving
Clock
Moments
Apart
Overlap
Hands
Everyday
Crumbs
Two
Exactly
Toast
Come
Move
Toasts
Sometimes
Silence
Burnt
Like
Alone
Carrying

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I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back. We were locked in a stare of mutual disgust.
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I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.
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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.
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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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When you're younger, it's all theoretical. It's all potential. As you get older, it becomes actual, and your life gets filled with unexpected complexity some of it asked for, and some of it not. It becomes richer, I find.
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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
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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.
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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.
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The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.
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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.
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The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces.
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At night the sky is pure astronomy.
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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.
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I like to think the world wasn't ready for me, but maybe the truth is that I wasn't ready for the world. I've always arrived too late for my life.
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...we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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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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.
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