Youโre lost in your own world, in the things that happen there, and youโve locked all the doors. Sometimes I look at you sleeping. I wake up and look at you and I feel closer to you when youโre like that, unguarded, than when youโre awake. When youโre awake youโre like someone with her eyes closed, watching a movie on the inside of your eyelids. I canโt reach you anymore. Once upon a time I could, but not now, and not for a long time.
Nicole KraussThe clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.
Nicole KraussI read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)
Nicole KraussSometimes I get the feeling that we're just a bunch of habits. The gestures we repeat over and over, they're just our need to be recognized. Without them, we'd be unidentifiable. We have to reinvent ourselves every minute.
Nicole KraussAll my life I have arrived early only to find myself standing self-consciously on a corner, outside a door, in an empty room, but the closer I get to death the earlier I arrive, the longer I am content to wait, perhaps to give myself the false sensation that there is too much time rather than not enough.
Nicole Krauss