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.
Nicole Kraussthere are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.
Nicole KraussHe 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.
Nicole KraussThere 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.
Nicole Krauss