{"author":"Nicole Krauss","author_id":"Nicole+Krauss","total_quotes":74,"quotes":[{"text":"My son's mother, the girl I fell in love with when I was ten, died five years ago. I expect to join her soon, at least in that. Tomorrow. Or the next day. Of that I am convinced. I thought it would be strange to live in the world without her in it. And yet. I'd gotten used to living with her memory a long time ago. Only at the very end did I see her again. I snuck into her room in the hospital and sat with her every day.","author":"Nicole Krauss","tags":["true-love"],"id":171,"author_id":"Nicole+Krauss"},{"text":"...After all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?","author":"Nicole Krauss","tags":["childhood"],"id":3825,"author_id":"Nicole+Krauss"},{"text":"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 rushing past: IwasabeautifulgirlPleasedon’tgoItoobelievemybodyismadeofglass-I’veneverlovedanyoneIthinkofmyselfasfunnyForgiveme….There was a time when it wasn’t uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations. Shy people carried a little bunch of string in their pockets, but people considered loudmouths had no less need for it, since those used to being overheard by everyone were often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by someone. The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need for the string.\tThe practice of attaching cups to the ends of string came much later. Some say it is related to the irrepressible urge to press shells to our ears, to hear the still-surviving echo of the world’s first expression. Others say it was started by a man who held the end of a string that was unraveled across the ocean by a girl who left for America.When the world grew bigger, and there wasn’t enough string to keep the things people wanted to say from disappearing into the vastness, the telephone was invented.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.","author":"Nicole Krauss","tags":["listening","love","poignant"],"id":10987,"author_id":"Nicole+Krauss"},{"text":"When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit.","author":"Nicole Krauss","tags":["death","love","obituary","romance"],"id":17735,"author_id":"Nicole+Krauss"},{"text":"I was familiar with the little mating rituals of getting to know each other, of dragging out the stories from childhood, summer camp, and high school, the famous humiliations, and the adorable things you said as a child, the familial dramas—of having a portrait of yourself, all the while making yourself out to be a little brighter, a little more deep than deep down you knew you actually were. And though I hadn’t had more than three or four relationships, I already knew that each time the thrill of telling another the story of yourself wore off a little more, each time you threw yourself into it a little less, and grew more distrustful of an intimacy that always, in the end, failed to pass into true understanding.","author":"Nicole Krauss","tags":["great-house","identity","love","nicole-krauss","relationships"],"id":19011,"author_id":"Nicole+Krauss"},{"text":"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 life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father. And to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.","author":"Nicole Krauss","tags":["feeling","loss","love","sadness"],"id":27586,"author_id":"Nicole+Krauss"},{"text":"Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.","author":"Nicole Krauss","tags":["love","romantic"],"id":30825,"author_id":"Nicole+Krauss"},{"text":"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 someone's hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted--wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought: Please don't look at me. If you don't, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.","author":"Nicole Krauss","tags":["love","romance"],"id":33644,"author_id":"Nicole+Krauss"},{"text":"I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245).","author":"Nicole Krauss","tags":["aging","life","sad"],"id":61066,"author_id":"Nicole+Krauss"},{"text":"You fall in love, it's intoxicating, an for a little while you feel like you've actually become one with the other person. Merged souls, and so on. You think you'll never be lonely again. Only it doesn't last and soon you realize you can only get so close and you end up brutally disappointed, more alone than ever, because the illusion-the hope you'd held on to all those years-has been shattered.","author":"Nicole Krauss","tags":["disappointment","loneliness","love"],"id":62220,"author_id":"Nicole+Krauss"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":74,"pages":8,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}