Nicole Krauss Quotes

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

At night the sky is pure astronomy.

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 need people as others did. After writing all day it took an effort to make conversation, like wading through cement, and often I simply chose not to make it, eating at a restaurant with a book or going for long walks alone instead, unwinding the solitude of the day through the city. But loneliness, true loneliness, is impossible to accustom oneself to, and while I was still young I thought of my situation as somehow temporary, and did not stop hoping and imagining that I would meet someone and fall in love... Yes, there was a time before I closed myself off to others.

Bird asked what a paleontologist was and Mom said that if he took a complete, illustrated guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shred it into a hundred pieces, cast them into the wind from the museum’s steps, let a few weeks pass, went back and scoured Fifth Avenue and Central Park for as many surviving scraps as he could find, then tried to reconstruct the history of painting, including schools, styles, genres, and names of painters from his scraps, that would be like a paleontologist.

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.

When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit

Aside from myself, there was no sign of me.

I tried to make sense of things. Now that I think about it, I have always tried. It could be my epitaph. LEO GURSKY: HE TRIED TO MAKE SENSE.

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 doesn't last and soon you realize you can only get so close and you end up brutally disappointed, more alone than ever, because the illusion-the hope you'd held on to all those years-has been shattered.

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.

But how can one regret what, to the mind, has never existed? Even loss is an inaccurate description, for what loss is without the awareness of losing?

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

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.

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.

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.