I smiled back, the importance of manners, my mother always said, is inversely related to how inclined one is to use them, or, in other words, sometimes politeness is all that stands between oneself and madness. — Nicole Krauss Copy Share Image
“Narrative cannot sustain formlessness any more than light can sustain darkness - it is the antithesis of formlessness, and so it can never truly communicate it. Chaos is the one truth that narrative must always betray, for in the creation of its delicate structures that reveal many truths about life, the portion of truth that has to do with incoherence… — Nicole Krauss Copy Share
I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a… — Nicole Krauss Copy Share Image
When we went into the ocean, I watched his body as he dove into the waves, and it gave me a feeling in my… — Nicole Krauss Copy Share Image
“There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes matter worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and… — Nicole Krauss Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“The air felt different in my lungs. The world no longer looked the same. You change and then you change again. You become a dog, a bird, a plant that always leans to the left. 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… — Nicole Krauss Copy Share
“The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people’s hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost… — Nicole Krauss Copy Share
I feel really strongly about not wanting to overly guide the reader about what he or she should think. I really trust the reader… — Nicole Krauss Copy Share Image
Mom?" I said. She turned. "Can I talk to you about something?" "Of course, darling. Come here." I took a few steps into the… — Nicole Krauss Copy Share Image
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… — Nicole Krauss Copy Share Image
Obviously I've been reading Kafka for a long long time, since I was really young, and even before I ever read him I knew who he was. I had this weird sense that he was some kind of family. Like Uncle Kafka. Now I really think of him that way, the way we think about an uncle who opened up… — Nicole Krauss Copy Share
“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… — Nicole Krauss Copy Share Image
