Nicole Krauss Quotes

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

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

“You’re lost in your own world, in the things that happen there, and you’ve locked all the doors. Sometimes I look at you sleeping. I wake up and look at you and I feel closer to you when you’re like that, unguarded, than when you’re awake. When you’re awake you’re like someone with her eyes closed, watching a movie on the inside of your eyelids. I can’t reach you anymore. Once upon a time I could, but not now, and not for a long time.”

“She abandoned the garden, and the mums and asters that had trusted her to see them through to the first frost hung their waterlogged heads.”

“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 things you said as a child, the familial dramas—of having a portrait of yourself, all the while making yourself out to be a little brighter, a little more deep than deep down you knew you actually were. And though I hadn’t had more than three or four relationships, I already knew that each time the thrill of telling another the story of yourself wore off a little more, each time you threw yourself into it a little less, and grew more distrustful of an intimacy that always, in the end, failed to pass into true understanding.”

“Empty teacups gathered around her and dictionary pages fell at her feet.”

“To hike out alone in the desert; to sleep on the valley floor on a night with no moon, in the pitch black, just listening to the boom of silence: you can't imagine what that's like.”

“Being in the studio is a really romantic time.”

“The smile on your face lets me know that you need me, there's a truth in your heart that says you'll never leave me, and the touch of your hand says you'll catch me whenever I fall.”

“You know, for most of its life bluegrass has had this stigma of being all straw hats and hay bales and not necessarily the most sophisticated form of music. Yet you can't help responding to its honesty. It's music that finds its way deep into your soul because it's strings vibrating against wood and nothing else.”

“. . . I would have let him go one finger at a time, until, without his realizing, he'd be floating without me. And then I thought, perhaps that is what it means to be a [parent] - to teach your child to live without you.”