335 Quotes by Nicole Krauss

I finally understood that no matter what I did, or who I found, I-he-none of us-would ever be able to win over the memories she had of Dad, memories that soothed her even while they made her sad, because she’d built a world out of them she knew how to survive on even if no one else could.

I’m very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.

The way Misha tells it, he drove like a blind man, giving the car almost full independence to feel its way along, bumping off things, only giving the wheel a spin with the tips of this fingers when the situation verged on life threatening.

When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn’t control what came through it.

In one’s youth, one has tremendous access to one’s feelings. And as one gets older, some of those feelings kind of drift away. But so much more happens to you. There’s more at stake in life.

After all, the world population of artists has exploded, almost no one is not an artist now; in turning our attention inward, so have we turned all of our hope inward, believing that meaning can be found or made there. Having cut ourselves off from all that is unknowable and that might truly fill us with awe, we can only find wonderment in our own powers of creativity.

But we didn’t invent the idea of a single God; we only wrote a story of our struggle to remain true to Him and in doing so we invented ourselves. We gave ourselves a past and inscribed ourselves into the future.

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.

The more freedom I allow myself as a writer to wander, become lost and go into uncertain territory – and I am always trying to go to the more awkward place, the more difficult place – the more frightening it is, because I have no plan.