110+ Nicole Krauss Quotes On Happiness, Friendship And Order

Nicole Krauss is an American novelist and short story writer. She is best known for her 2005 novel The History of Love, which was a New York Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Krauss has also written two collections of short stories and two other novels, Man Walks Into a Room and Great House. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Nicole Krauss on love, life, happiness.

Top 10 Nicole Krauss Quotes

1. ...we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. What about you? Are you happiest and saddest right now that you've ever been?" "Of course I am." "Why?" "Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.
8. So many words get lost. They leave the mouthand lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past.
9. The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you're left with is your ambition.
10. ...after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

Nicole Krauss Short Quotes

• lonely people are always up in the middle of the night.
• At night the sky is pure astronomy.
• The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.
• Better to try and fail than not to try at all
• There's no match for the silence of GOD.
• It is impossible to distrust one's writing without awakening a deeper distrust in oneself.
• Even among the angels, there is the sadness of division.
• Empty teacups gathered around her and dictionary pages fell at her feet.
• The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.
• Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.

Nicole Krauss Quotes About Love

One of us had loved the other more perfectly, had watched the other more closely, and one of us listened and the other hadn’t, and one of us held on to the ambition of the one idea far longer than was reasonable, whereas the other, passing a garbage can one night, had casually thrown it away. — Nicole Krauss

I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in. — Nicole Krauss

Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you. — Nicole Krauss

And if the man who once upon a time had been a boy who promised he'd never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise, it wasn't because he was stubborn or even loyal. He couldn't help it. — Nicole Krauss

An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand. — Nicole Krauss

If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it. — Nicole Krauss

After all who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of their loneliness — Nicole Krauss

Part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you. — Nicole Krauss

She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence. — Nicole Krauss

All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen. — Nicole Krauss

Nicole Krauss Quotes About Life

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. — Nicole Krauss

To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life. — Nicole Krauss

When you're younger, it's all theoretical. It's all potential. As you get older, it becomes actual, and your life gets filled with unexpected complexity; some of it asked for, and some of it not. It becomes richer, I find. — Nicole Krauss

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. — Nicole Krauss

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. — Nicole Krauss

My first novel, 'Man Walks Into a Room,' is about a man who's lost his memory and has to start a second life. On one level, it's about how we create a coherent sense of self. — Nicole Krauss

Sometimes I forget that the world is not on the same schedule as I. That everything is not dying, or that if it is dying it will return to life, what with a little sun and the usual encouragement. — Nicole Krauss

I like to think the world wasn't ready for me, but maybe the truth is that I wasn't ready for the world. I've always arrived too late for my life. — Nicole Krauss

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. — Nicole Krauss

Life in general in my experience gets deeper and deeper, more and more profound, more and more complex, the older one gets. — Nicole Krauss

Nicole Krauss Quotes About Hope

...our eyes locked in one of those looks that sometimes happen between strangers, when both wordlessly agree that reality contains sinkholes whose depths neither can ever hope to fathom. — Nicole Krauss

the shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed, or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it. — Nicole Krauss

But loneliness, true loneliness, is impossible to accustom oneself to, and while I was still young I thought of my situation as somehow temporary, and did not stop hoping and imagining that I would meet someone and fall in love...Yes, there was a time before I closed myself off to others. — Nicole Krauss

Nicole Krauss Quotes About World

When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely. — Nicole Krauss

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 — Nicole Krauss

It's one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you. — Nicole Krauss

The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it-just to name it-must have been like trying to catch something invisible. — Nicole Krauss

To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that cold be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame. — Nicole Krauss

And it's like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway across the world, only this was the opposite of disaster, how by accident she saved me with that thoughtless act of grace, and she never knew, and how that, too, is the part of the history of love. — Nicole Krauss

...The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world! — Nicole Krauss

I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back. We were locked in a stare of mutual disgust. — 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. — Nicole Krauss

I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw us to literature is that it gives us this very attractive illusion that there is meaning in the world - things connect. — Nicole Krauss

Nicole Krauss Quotes About Died

And he isn't crying for her, not for his grandma, he's crying for himself: that he: too, is going to die one day. And before that his friends wil die, and the friends of his friends, and, as time passes, the children of his friends, and, if his fate is truly bitter, his own children. (58) — Nicole Krauss

He died alone because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone. — Nicole Krauss

I try to make a point of being seen. Sometimes when I'm out, I'll buy a juice even when I'm not thirsty. If the store is crowded I'll even go so far as dropping change all over the floor, nickels and dimes skidding in every direction. All I want is not to die on a day I went unseen. — Nicole Krauss

Nicole Krauss Famous Quotes And Sayings

For her I changed pebbles into diamonds, shoes into mirrors, I changed glass into water, I gave her wings and pulled birds from her ears and in her pockets she found the feathers, I asked a pear to become a pineapple, a pineapple to become a lightbulb, a lightbulb to become the moon, and the moon to become a coin I flipped for her love. — Nicole Krauss

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. — Nicole Krauss

I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations. — Nicole Krauss

Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance. — Nicole Krauss

Once upon a time there was a boy who lived in a house across the field from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was Queen and he was King. In the autumn light, her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls. When the sky grew dark they parted with leaves in their hair. — Nicole Krauss

No, what I felt was the torment of waiting, stuck between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next which might or might not bring a hail storm, plane crash, poetic justice, or a miraculous reversal. — Nicole Krauss

. . . I would have let him go one finger at a time, until, without his realizing, he'd be floating without me. And then I thought, perhaps that is what it means to be a [parent] - to teach your child to live without you. — Nicole Krauss

The book Forest Dark wants to provoke questions about what is reality and why are we so given to believe that reality is firm and unbendable. There's a whole host of questions that the book is asking about that. Why do we believe that the world is only one way and as we see it? Why are we not open to the ways in which it might be otherwise. — Nicole Krauss

I left the library. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten, I stood on the sidewalk, a nothing, a gatherer of dust. People hurried past me. and everyone who walked by was happier than I. I felt the old envy. I would have given anything to be one of them. — Nicole Krauss

He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. — Nicole Krauss

I do realize that the reader needs some form of resolution. Sometimes I think of it almost like writing a musical score where things have to harmonize and certain lines have to come to a close. — Nicole Krauss

The truth was I'd given up waiting long ago. The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces. Or better to say, in my face. Grammar of my life: as a rule of thumb, wherever there appears a plural, correct for singular. Should I ever let slip a royal We, put me out of my misery with a swift blow to the head. — Nicole Krauss

The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder. — Nicole Krauss

THE DEATH OF LEOPOLD GURSKY Leopold Gursky started dying on August 18, 1920. He died learning to walk. He died standing at the blackboard. And once, also, carrying a heavy tray. He died practicing a new way to sign his name. Opening a window. Washing his genitals in the bath. He died alone, because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone. Or he died thinking about Alma. Or when he chose not to. — Nicole Krauss

There was no one to call me to bed, no one to demand that the rhythms of my life operate in a duet. — Nicole Krauss

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web. — Nicole Krauss

I’ve always liked the feeling of traveling light; there is something in me that wants to feel I could leave wherever I am, at any time, without any effort. The idea of being weighed down made me uneasy, as if I lived on the surface of a frozen lake and each new trapping of domestic life - a pot, a chair, a lamp - threatened to be the thing that sent me through the ice. — Nicole Krauss

I'm the opposite of someone like David Grossman, who knows how his characters walk, and how they smell. I don't allow myself to imagine what mine look like at all. My sense of them comes from the inside. They remain, by necessity, physically vague in my mind. — Nicole Krauss

Forests, which I think do contain a lot mystery and traditionally are the setting for lawlessness and magic and what is outside of the rational to some degree, are still something more finite. I guess the desert and its crushing sense of infinite space is part of its connection to the mystical - on top of making you dehydrated and therefore primed for visions. — Nicole Krauss

Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it's intoxicating, and for a little while, you actually feel like you've become one with the other person, merged souls and so on. You think you'll never be lonely again. — Nicole Krauss

One is always changing. I don't want to write the same book and I couldn't, because I'm a different person. — Nicole Krauss

I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read. — Nicole Krauss

I think in the whole field of questions about what we take to be "real," one of those questions is about the self. When you talk about the self we're always talking about whether it's a construction and it's a construction we're always in the process of working on. I don't think that work ever ends, to some degree. — Nicole Krauss

That powers my desire to write: the sense of how quickly everything on the surface of life can be cut away and you can suddenly be inside the most inner part of the most inner life of a person. What does it feel like there, and what are the regrets and sensations and longings, and what is the music of it? — Nicole Krauss

ONE THING I AM NEVER GOING TO DO WHEN I GROW UP Is fall in love, drop out of college, learn to subsist on water and air, have a species named after me, and ruin my life. — Nicole Krauss

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. — Nicole Krauss

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 — Nicole Krauss

You're looking for ways always as the writer to bring readers into intimacy, you with them with you. Photos can sometimes do the opposite, create distance and perspective, but these somehow didn't. They somehow bring the reader closer. — Nicole Krauss

. . . she gave him one of those broad smiles she reserved for strangers, as if she were aware of being able to pass, in their eyes, for an ordinary woman. — Nicole Krauss

It's strange what the heart can do when the mind is giving the directions. — Nicole Krauss

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

Our kiss was niticlimactic. It wasn't that the kiss was bad, but it was just a note of punctuation in our long conversation, a parenthetical remark made in order to assure each other of a deeply felt agreement, a mutual offer of companionship, which is so much more rare than sexual passion or even love. — Nicole Krauss

When we went into the ocean, I watched his body as he dove into the waves, and it gave me a feeling in my stomach that wasn't an ache but something different. — Nicole Krauss

Why are we so addicted to factual knowledge? Why are we so uncomfortable with the unknown? Is it something about the anxiety of our time? Because of course that wasn't always the way. Even now the whole idea of the rational individual has been subject to question and yet we still cling to this idea of factual, rational knowledge being more valuable than whatever its opposite might be. — Nicole Krauss

I know there is a moral to this story, but I don't know what it is. — Nicole Krauss

At first Babel longed for the use of just two words: Yes and No. But he knew that just to utter a single word would be to destroy the delicate fluency of silence. — Nicole Krauss

Perhaps that is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you. — Nicole Krauss

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. — Nicole Krauss

The malpractice for advice-giving is like five times as much as a craniotomy. — Nicole Krauss

And so he did the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away. — Nicole Krauss

Herman slipped his hand into mine, and I thought, An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand, and the next thing that happened was we kissed each other, and I found I knew how, and I felt happy and sad in equal parts, because I knew that I was falling in love, but it wasn't with him. — Nicole Krauss

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 get to the bathroom. To reach the armoire to get a pair of underpants he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn't choose that moment to sit on his face. At night, when he closed his eyes, he felt it looming above him. — Nicole Krauss

I won't waste your time with the injuries of my childhood, with my loneliness, or the fear and sadness of the years I spent inside my parents' marriage, under the reign of my father's rage, afer all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood? — Nicole Krauss

Later - when things happened that they could never have imagined - she wrote him a letter that said: When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything — Nicole Krauss

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 — Nicole Krauss

Don’t you see?” I said. “He could change every detail, but he couldn’t change her.” “But why?” His obtuseness frustrated me. “Because he was in love with her!” I said. “Because, to him, she was the only thing that was real. — Nicole Krauss

Tell me, was I the sort of person who took your elbow when cars passed on the street, touched your cheek while you talked, combed your wet hair, stopped by the side of the road in the country to point out certain constellations, standing behind you so that you had the advantage of leaning and looking up? — Nicole Krauss

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer. — Nicole Krauss

Franz Kafka is dead. He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." — Nicole Krauss

We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break. And it’s there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait. — Nicole Krauss

Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I'd been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it. — Nicole Krauss

Then I turned the page and at the top it said THINGS I MISS ABOUT M and there was a list of 15 things, and the first was THE WAY HE HOLDS THINGS. I did not understand how you can miss the way somebody holds things. — Nicole Krauss

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. — Nicole Krauss

She struggled with her sadness, but tried to conceal it, to divide it into smaller and smaller parts and scatter these in places she thought no one would find them. — Nicole Krauss

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. — Nicole Krauss

All my life I have arrived early only to find myself standing self-consciously on a corner, outside a door, in an empty room, but the closer I get to death the earlier I arrive, the longer I am content to wait, perhaps to give myself the false sensation that there is too much time rather than not enough. — Nicole Krauss

I walked down my snow covered street. Out of habit I turned and checked for my footsteps. When I arrived at my building I looked for my name on the buzzers. And because I know that sometimes I see things that aren't there, after dinner I called Information to ask if I was listed.(25) — Nicole Krauss

In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry. — Nicole Krauss

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. — Nicole Krauss

The truth is that she told me she couldn't love me. When she said goodbye, she was saying goodbye forever. And yet. I made myself forget. I don't know why. I keep asking myself. But I did. — Nicole Krauss

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 in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about. — Nicole Krauss

Alone in my room, wrapped in a blanket, I whimpered and talked aloud to myself, recalling the lost glory of my youth when I considered myself, and was considered by others, a bright and capable person. It seemed that was all gone now. — Nicole Krauss

He held my hand and told me a story about when he was six and threw a rock at a kid's head who was bullying his brother, and how after that no one had bothered either of them again. 'You have to stick up for yourself,' he told me. 'But it's bad to throw rocks,' I said. 'I know. You're smarter than me. You'll find something better than rocks. — Nicole Krauss

Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all. — Nicole Krauss

How was it possible to wake up every day and be recognizable to another when so often one was barely recognizable to oneself? — Nicole Krauss

There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you'd forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularily life with other people, possible. — Nicole Krauss

He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood. — Nicole Krauss

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. — Nicole Krauss

In nature forms are endlessly being destroyed and then recreated and destroyed and recreated. Nature isn't afraid to destroy forms in the process of regenerating. So why are we afraid of that in life? — Nicole Krauss

Life Lessons by Nicole Krauss

1. Nicole Krauss teaches us to look at the world through a lens of empathy and understanding, showing us the importance of connection and communication in our lives.
2. She emphasizes the power of storytelling, demonstrating how stories can help us to make sense of our lives and our relationships with others.
3. Krauss reminds us to be open to the possibilities of life, to take risks and to never give up on our dreams.