335 Quotes by Nicole Krauss

Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant. once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs. But sometimes, at rare moments, a memory of him will return to me with such suddenness and clarity that all the feeling I’ve pushed down for years springs out like a jack-in-the-box.

You can’t imagine how hard I am on myself. Nothing pummels me like my own doubts, the feeling of how far I still have to go.

Somewhere in the far north of Canada there wuld be snow, falling soundlessly overy the Beaufort Sea, falling over the Artic without a soul to see it. What kind of weather was that, Samson wondered, and how was one to use this information except as proof that the world was too much to bear?

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.

I know sometimes things are hard with Mum.” “She misses Dad,” I said, which was like pointing out that a sky-scraper is tall. Uncle Julian nodded.

If the book is a mystery to its author as she’s writing, inevitably it’s going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.

I’ve reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.

At the end, all that’s left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that’s why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.

If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms – i you find yourself at a loss for what do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignnes of your own body – it’s because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what’s inside and what’s outside, was so much less.