Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her three novels Man Walks Into a Room, The History of Loveand Great House. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003 and Best American Short Stories 2008. Her novels have been translated into 35 languages. In 2010, she was selected as one of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" writers...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth18 August 1974
CountryUnited States of America
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.
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.
He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard [...]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.
There's no match for the silence of GOD.
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.
Getting a book published made me feel a little bit sad. I felt driven by the need to write a book, rather than the need to write. I needed to figure out what was important to me as a writer.
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.
("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.")
He died alone because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone.
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 pages away, and when the air cleared of all those fluttering white sheets the room would be silent, the chair where I sat empty.
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.
When I was with Yoav, everything in me that had been sitting stood up. He had a way of looking at me with a kind of unabashed directness that made me shiver. It's something amazing to feel that for the first time someone is seeing you as you really are, not as they wish you, or you wish yourself, to be.
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.
There is a fallacy that the powerful emotion of youth mellows with time. Not true. One learns to control and suppress it. But it doesn't lessen. It simply hides and concentrates itself in more discreet places. When one accidentally stumbles into one of these abysses, the pain is spectacular.