335 Quotes by Nicole Krauss

Better to try and fail than not to try at all.

I looked at the map of India on the wall. Every 14-year-old should know the exact location of Calcutta. It wouldn’t do to go around without the faintest clue of where Calcutta was.

I have a very strong sense of architecture in my novels. But at first it’s sometimes like building a doorknob before you have a door, and a door before you have a room.

What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I’d say it’s this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.

I was never a man of great ambition I cried too easily I didn’t have a head for science Words often failed me While others prayed I only moved my lips.

What interests me very much as a writer is the ability for writing to have our lives to be occupied so vividly by others. I think that’s what we long for as writers.

The whole afternoon might go by without our saying a word. If we do talk, we might never speak in Yiddish. 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.

When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything?

The fact that you got a little happier today doesn’t change the fact that you also became a little sadder. Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you’re the happiest and saddest you’ve ever been in your whole life.