Nicole Krauss

“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”

“When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?”

“there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.”

“Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling som...”

“Once upon a time, there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovere...”

“So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days, you can hear their chorus rushi...”

“If I had a camera,' I said, 'I'd take a picture of you every day. That way I'd remember how you looked every single day of your life.”

“She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex...”

“All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist.”

“He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to...”

“When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit”

“At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same, that when my book ended I'd end, a great wind would sweep through my rooms carrying the...”

“The fear of death haunted me for a year. I cried whenever anyone dropped a glass or broke a picture. But even then that passed, I was left with a sadness that couldn't be rubbed off. It wasn...”

“In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.”

“In the days after my heart attack & before I began to write again, all I could think about was dying. I'd been spared again, and only after the danger had passed did I allow my thoughts to u...”

“These things are lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone taking the time to write it all down. That Litvinoff had a wife who was so devoted is, to be...”

“Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it...”

“We met each other when we were young, before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.”

“It would mark the end of a year that he might look back on as hands, a pivot between two lines. Or not: maybe enough time, would pass that eventually he would look back on his life, all of i...”

“That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.”