After all who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of their loneliness Nicole Krauss More Quotes by Nicole Krauss More Quotes From 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 names trying world 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 ice light lakes 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 grace opposites world 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 wall order people 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 bullying brother kids 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 pages missing way ("Let's stand under a tree," she said. "Why?" "Because it's nicer." "Maybe you should sit on a chair, and I'll stand above you, like they always do with husbands and wives." "That's stupid." "Why's it stupid?" "Because we're not married." "Should we hold hands?" "We can't." "But why?" "Because, people will know." "Know what?" "About us." "So what if they know?" "It's better when it's a secret." "Why?" "So no one can take it from us.") Nicole Krauss husband stupid hands 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 happened said letters He died alone because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone. Nicole Krauss died embarrassed phones In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry. Nicole Krauss hungry refuse tables 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 self men memories 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 illustration notebook littles 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 littles today mean I knew that to find and to feel Yoav again would be terribly painful, because of what had become of him, and because of what I knew he could ignite in me, a vitality that was excruciating because like a flare it lit up the emptiness inside me and exposed what I always secretly knew about myself: how much time I'd spent being only partly alive, and how easily I'd accepted a lesser life. Nicole Krauss vitality alive would-be The malpractice for advice-giving is like five times as much as a craniotomy. Nicole Krauss malpractice advice giving 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 space gone tree lonely people are always up in the middle of the night. Nicole Krauss lonely night people Even among the angels, there is the sadness of division. Nicole Krauss division sadness angel 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. Nicole Krauss used nostalgia lost 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. Nicole Krauss moon sleep night