335 Quotes by Nicole Krauss

Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say ‘Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I’ve always been right to love you.’ Because of the frequency of these mistakes, over time the gesture for asking forgiveness evolved into the simplest form. Just to open your palm was to say: Forgive me.

Then he almost but didn’t say the two sentence he’d been meaning to say for years: part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you.

Put even a fool in front of the window and you’ll get a Spinoza; in the end life makes window watchers of us all.

After she left everything fell apart. No Jew was safe. There were rumors of unfathomable things, and because we couldn’t fathom them we failed to believe them, until we had no choice and it was too late. p 8.

Where he saw a page of words, his friend saw the field of hesitations, black holes, and possibilities between the words. Where his friend saw dappled light, the felicity of flight, the sadness of gravity, he saw the solid form of a common sparrow.

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person’s silence.

He was an average man. A man willing to accept things as they were, and, because of this, he lacked the potential to be in anyway original.

When the word ‘nostalgia’ was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology – not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness.

When he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence. He discovered the places in a room where silence gathered; the folds of the curtain drapes, the deep bowls of the family silver. When people spoke to him he heard less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not.