Nicole Krauss Quotes

Everything is an old story, even what we think of as the "self" is just a narrative that our parents began telling when we were born, of which we take up authorship.

Even after the only person whose opinion I cared about left on a boat for America, I continued to fill pages with her name.

The windows in my bedroom face east and have no curtains, and to wake up into that light and a book is joy as I know it. I read many books at once, all of them paper. I think the book must be the most perfect object ever designed by humans. Their physical beauty and how well they work — dayenu! — but then there is the way they often absorb their reader’s presence, too. Tea, ink, greasy fingers, receipts, weather, but more than that, something of the spirit, too, so that years later you can take the book down off the shelf and a flash of your old self leaps out at you. I won’t easily give that up.

Perhaps that is what it means to be a father- to teach your child to live without you. If so, no one was a greater father than I.

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.