Nicole Krauss Quotes

• All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen. [citation needed]
• The words of our childhood became strangers to us- we couldn't use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language. [citation needed]
• When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.
• Even after the only person whose opinion I cared about left on a boat for America, I continued to fill pages with her name.
• When I got up again, I'd shed the only part of me that had ever thought I'd find words for even the smallest bit of life.
• Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.
• These things were lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone ever taking the time to write it all down.
• Perhaps that is what it means to be a father- to teach your child to live without you. If so, no one was a greater father than I.
• Franz Kafka is dead
• P. 187
• 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.
• P. 349
• Sometimes I think: I am older than this tree, older than this bench, older than the rain. And yet. I'm not older than the rain. It's been falling for years and after I go it will keep on falling.
• P. 349
• The little boy I watched throwing pebbles into the empty fountain [...] You could tell that he had too much wisdom for his age. Probably he believed that he wasn't made for this world. I wanted to say to him: If not you, who?
• P. 351

nicole krauss