Quotes by Nicole Krauss

“Maybe Grodzenski was showing me, with his quiet pride, the reason he hummed a little while he worked.”

“I left the library. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten, I stood on the sidewalk, a nothing, a gatherer of dust. P...”

“You fall in love, it's intoxicating, an for a little while you feel like you've actually become one with the other person. Merged souls, and so on. You think you'll never be lonely again. Only it d...”

“When you are young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close -- as close as you can get -- to another person only makes clear that impassable distance between you."[]...”

“It wasn't always like this. There was a time when I imagined my life could happen in another way. It's true that early on I became used to the long hours I spent alone. I discovered that I did not ...”

“Because it hardly ends with falling in love. Just the opposite. I don't need to tell you, Your Honor, I sense that you understand true loneliness. How you fall in love and it's there that the work ...”

“Youre lost in your own world, in the things that happen there, and youve locked all the doors. Sometimes I look at you sleeping. I wake up and look at you and I feel closer to you when youre like t...”

“When you're young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close-as close as you can get-to another person only makes it clear the impassable distance between you.”

“Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”

“The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.”

“HE LIKED TO COOK AND LAUGH AND SING, COULD START A FIRE WITH HIS HANDS, FIX THINGS THAT WERE BROKEN, AND EXPLAIN HOW TO LAUNCH THINGS INTO SPACE, BUT HE DIED WITHIN NINE MONTHS”

“...after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?”

“It's one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you.”

“To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you hav...”

“I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.”

“Having begun to feel, peoples 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.”

“The malpractice for advice-giving is like five times as much as a craniotomy.”

“From then on, I was terrified that I or one of my parents were going to die. My mother worried me the most. She was the force around which our world turned. Unlike our father, who spent his life in...”

“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 reinven...”

“I was familiar with the little mating rituals of getting to know each other, of dragging out the stories from childhood, summer camp, and high school, the famous humiliations, and the adorable thin...”