Quotations

From The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

all i want is not to die on a day when i went unseen.

(on being a locksmith) the truth is i came to like it. i helped those in who were locked out, others i helped keep out what couldn't be let in, so that that could sleep without nightmares.

i was aware of time passing for the sake of itself.

maybe this is how i'll go, in a fit of laughter, what could be better, laughing and crying, laughing and singing, laughing so as to forget that i am alone, that it is the end of my life, that death is waiting outside the door for me.

even after the only person whose opinion i cared about left on a boat for america, i continued to fill the pages with her name. after she left, everything fell apart.

i started to write again. i did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. it didn't matter if i found the words, and more than that, i knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.

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.

i'm a man who wanted to be as large as life.

i was never a man of great ambition. i cried to easily. i didn't have a head for science. words often failed me. while others prayed i only moved my lips.

my heart is weak and unreliable. when i go it will be my heart. i try to burden it as little as possible. if something is going to have an impact, i direct it elsewhere... the pancreas i reserve for being struck by all that's been lost. it's true that there's so much, and the organ is so small. but. you would be surprised how much it can take, all i feel is a quick sharp pain and then it's over... the pain of forgetting: spine. the pain of remembering: spine... loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.

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.

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... i was a human cancer. and to be honest: i wasn't really angry. not anymore. i had left my anger somewhere long ago... i didn't know any other way of being. one day i woke up and said to myself: it's not too late

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.

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... to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.

Bird asked what a paleontologist was and Mom said that if he took a complete, illustrated guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shred it into a hundred pieces, cast them into the wind from the museum's steps, let a few weeks pass, went back and scoured Fifth Avenue and Central Park for as many surviving scraps as he could find, then tried to reconstruct the history of painting, including schools, styles, genres, and names of painters from his scraps, that would be like being a paleontologist.

and though you were grown up by then, you felt as lost as a child. and though your pride was broken, you felt as vast as your love for her. 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... you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. if it weren't for her, there would never have been that empty space, or the need to fill it.

feeling the joy of getting closer, even if deep down we can never forget the sadness of our insurmountable differences.

the first language humans had was gestures... there was 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... just to open your palm was to say: forgive me.

if you find yourself at a loss for what to do with (your hands), overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body- it's because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what's inside and what's outside, was so much less... holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.

i knew that the way others had lost a leg or an arm, i'd lost whatever the thing is that makes people indelible.

i danced the only way i knew how to dance: for life, crashing into the chairs, and spinning until i fell, so that i could get up and dance again, until dawn broke and found me prostrate on the floor, so close to death i could spit into it and whisper: L'chaim.

"it's better when it's a secret." "why?" "so no one can take it from us."

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 mean that right now, at this exact moment, you're the happiest and the saddest you've ever been in your whole life.

there was a first time joy was felt, and a first time for sadness. for a while, new feelings were being invented all the time. desire was born early, as was regret... having begun to feel, people's desire to feel grew. they wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how much it sometimes hurt.

a person's death belongs to no one but the one who's died.

litvinoff's life was definted by a delight in the weight of the real; his friend's by a rejection of reality, with its army of flat-footed facts.

she seemed to pull light and gravity to the place where she stood.

if you don't know what it feels like to have someone you love put a hand below your bottom rib for the first time, what chance is there for love?

forced to deny the world because it was inconsistent with his dream.

i should develop some useful skills like public speaking, electric cello, or welding, see a doctor about my stomachaces, find a hero that is not a man who wrote a children's book and crashed his plane, stop trying to set up my father's tent in record time, throw away my notebooks, stand up straight.

an average 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 eachother, 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.

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. sometimes i think: i am older than this tree, older than this bench, older than the rain. and yet. i'm not older than the rain. it's been falling for years and after i go it will keep on falling.