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Top Nicole Krauss Quotes

Browse top 137 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Nicole Krauss.

Favorite Nicole Krauss Quotes

1. "The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark." ~ Nicole Krauss
2. "I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)" ~ Nicole Krauss
3. "I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without." ~ Nicole Krauss
4. "...after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?" ~ Nicole Krauss
5. "One day she marched around the side of the house and confronted me. "I've seen you out there every day for the past week, and everyone knows you stare at me all day in school, if you have something you want to say to me why don't you just say it to my face instead of sneaking around like a crook?" I considered my options. Either I could run away and never go back to school again, maybe even leave the country as a stowaway on a ship bound for Australia. Or I could risk everything and confess to her. The answer was obvious: I was going to Australia. I opened my mouth to say goodbye forever. And yet. What I said was: I want to know if you'll marry me." ~ Nicole Krauss
6. "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
7. "The malpractice for advice-giving is like five times as much as a craniotomy." ~ Nicole Krauss
8. "Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone's hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted--wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought: Please don't look at me. If you don't, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me." ~ Nicole Krauss
9. "The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder." ~ Nicole Krauss
10. "The kiss stayed there with no place to go, no sensory reserve that could absorb it and file it away as a common act of intimacy, a thousand times received. He knew what Anna was asking: whether you could love someone without habits." ~ Nicole Krauss
11. "At night the sky is pure astronomy." ~ Nicole Krauss
12. "No, what I felt was the torment of waiting, stuck between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next which might or might not bring a hail storm, plane crash, poetic justice, or a miraculous reversal." ~ Nicole Krauss
13. "I have realised just how important it is to readers to feel that fictional stories are based on reality." ~ Nicole Krauss
14. "The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you're left with is your ambition." ~ Nicole Krauss
15. "To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life." ~ Nicole Krauss
16. "Getting a book published made me feel a little bit sad. I felt driven by the need to write a book, rather than the need to write. I needed to figure out what was important to me as a writer." ~ Nicole Krauss
17. "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
18. "If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms - if you find yourself at a loss for what to do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body - it's because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what's inside and what's outside was much less. It's not that we've forgotten the language of gestures entirely. The habit of moving our hands while we speak is left over from it. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs up : all artifacts of ancient gestures. Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it's too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other's body to make ourselves understood." ~ Nicole Krauss
19. "It's strange what the heart can do when the mind is giving the directions." ~ Nicole Krauss
20. "19. THE WALL OF DICTIONARIES BETWEEN MY MOTHER AND THE WORLD GETS TALLER EVERY YEARSometimes pages of the dictionaries come loose and gather at her feet, shallon, shalop, shallot, shallow, shalom, sham, shaman, shamble, like the petals of an immense flower. When I was little, I thought that the pages on the floor were words she would never be able to use again, and I tried to tape them back in where they belonged, out of fear that one day she would be left silent." ~ Nicole Krauss
21. ". . . to survive the dark and often terrifying passage of my life I came to believe certain thing about myself . . . I simply came to believe that one, factual circumstances of my life were almost accidental and didn't grow out of my own sould, and two, I possessed something unique, a special strength and depth of feeling that would allow me to withstand the hurt and injustice without being broken by it." ~ Nicole Krauss
22. "23. OUTSIDE, IT WAS STILL COMING DOWN" ~ Nicole Krauss
23. "And he isn't crying for her, not for his grandma, he's crying for himself: that he: too, is going to die one day. And before that his friends wil die, and the friends of his friends, and, as time passes, the children of his friends, and, if his fate is truly bitter, his own children. (58)" ~ Nicole Krauss
24. "As the rifles were pointed at his chest he wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard. He had thought the possibilities of human silence were endless." ~ Nicole Krauss
25. "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
26. "Atunci am vazut-o. E ciudat ce poate urzi mintea când inima o îmbolde?te. Arata altfel decât mi-o aminteam eu. ?i totu?i. Era aceea?i. Ochii: a?a am recunoscut-o. Mi-am spus: "Vasazica a?a ?i se arata îngerul. Oprit la vârsta la carea te-a iubit cel mai mult." ~ Nicole Krauss
27. "I made a point of answering the question I received with some frequency from journalists, Do you think books can change people's lives? (which really meant, Do you actually think anything you could write could mean anything to anyone?), with a little airtight thought experiment in which I asked the interviewer to imagine the sort of person he might be if all of the literature he'd read in his life were somehow excised from his mind, his mind and soul, and as the journalist contemplated this nuclear winter I sat back with a self-satisfied smile, saved again from facing the truth." ~ Nicole Krauss
28. "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
29. "He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard." ~ Nicole Krauss
30. "Having begun to feel, people's desire to feel grew. They wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how it sometimes hurt. People became addicted to feeling. They struggled to uncover new emotions." ~ Nicole Krauss
31. "There were many things they simply didn't talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family." ~ Nicole Krauss
32. "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
33. "The fear of death haunted me for a year. I cried whenever anyone dropped a glass or broke a picture. But even then that passed, I was left with a sadness that couldn't be rubbed off. It wasn't that something had happened. It was worse: I'd become aware of what had been with me all along without my notice. I dragged this new awareness around like a stone tied to my ankle. Wherever I went, it followed. I used to make up little sad songs in my head. I eulogized the falling leaves. I imagined my death in a hundred different ways, but the funeral was always the same: from somewhere in my imagination, out rolled a red carpet. Because after every secret death I died, my greatness was always discovered." ~ Nicole Krauss
34. "She [my mother] was the force around which our world turned. My mother was propelled through the universe by the brute force of reason. She was the judge in all our arguments. One disapproving word from her was enough to send us off to hide in a corner, where we would cry and fantasize our own martyrdom. And yet. One kiss could restore us to princedom. Without her, our lives would dissolve into chaos." ~ Nicole Krauss
35. "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
36. "Holy shit, Bird," I whispered through my teeth. "At least try to be normal. You have to at least try." ~ Nicole Krauss
37. ". . . 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
38. "All my life I have arrived early only to find myself standing self-consciously on a corner, outside a door, in an empty room, but the closer I get to death the earlier I arrive, the longer I am content to wait, perhaps to give myself the false sensation that there is too much time rather than not enough." ~ Nicole Krauss
39. "He held my hand and told me a story about when he was six and threw a rock at a kid's head who was bullying his brother, and how after that no one had bothered either of them again. 'You have to stick up for yourself,' he told me. 'But it's bad to throw rocks,' I said. 'I know. You're smarter than me. You'll find something better than rocks." ~ Nicole Krauss
40. "And so he did the hardest thing he'd ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away." ~ Nicole Krauss
41. "I knew that to find and to feel Yoav again would be terribly painful, because of what had become of him, and because of what I knew he could ignite in me, a vitality that was excruciating because like a flare it lit up the emptiness inside me and exposed what I always secretly knew about myself: how much time I'd spent being only partly alive, and how easily I'd accepted a lesser life." ~ Nicole Krauss
42. "The power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is. As such, I've never bought into the idea that the writer requires any special ritual in order to write. If need be, I could write almost anywhere, as easily in an ashram as in a crowded cafe, or so I've always insisted when asked whether I write with a pen or a computer, at morning or night, alone or surrounded, in a saddle like Goethe, standing like Hemingway, lying down like Twain, and so on, as if there were a secret to it all that might spring the lock of the safe housing the novel, fully formed and ready for publication, apparently suspended in each of us." ~ Nicole Krauss
43. "These valuable thing produced in us a feeling of intimidation. We knew that no matter how far we got in life, we would never really be meant for such fineness, that the few expensive antiques we did have had fallen to us from a higher life and now condescended to live among us." ~ Nicole Krauss
44. "I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back. We were locked in a stare of mutual disgust." ~ Nicole Krauss
45. "Why is it, he asked, that wherever a Chilean goes in the world, Neruda and his fucking seashells has already been there and set up a monopoly? He held my gaze waiting for me to counter him, and as he did I got the feeling that where he came from it was commonplace to talk as we were talking, an even to argue about poetry to the point of violence, and for a moment I felt brushed by loneliness." ~ Nicole Krauss
46. "The truth is the thing I invented so I could live." ~ Nicole Krauss
47. "2. WHAT I AM NOTMy brother and I used to play a game. I'd point to a chair. "THIS IS NOT A CHAIR," I'd say. Bird would point to the table. "THIS IS NOT A TABLE." "THIS IS NOT A WALL," I'd say. "THAT IS NOT A CEILING." We'd go on like that. "IT IS NOT RAINING OUT." "MY SHOE IS NOT UNTIED!" Bird would yell. I'd point to my elbow. "THIS IS NOT A SCRAPE." Bird would lift his knee. "THIS IS ALSO NOT A SCRAPE!" "THAT IS NOT A KETTLE!" "NOT A CUP!" "NOT A SPOON!" "NOT DIRTY DISHES!" We denied whole rooms, years, weathers. Once, at the peak of our shouting, Bird took a deep breath. At the top of his lungs, he shrieked: "I! HAVE NOT! BEEN! UNHAPPY! MY WHOLE! LIFE!" "But you're only seven," I said." ~ Nicole Krauss
48. "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
49. "Maybe Grodzenski was showing me, with his quiet pride, the reason he hummed a little while he worked." ~ Nicole Krauss
50. "When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it." ~ Nicole Krauss
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One of the very important characteristics of a student is to question. Let the students ask questions."
Author: A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

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