I feel really strongly about not wanting to overly guide the reader about what he or she should think. I really trust the reader to know for themselves and not to need too much. You have your own imagination, your own experiences, your own feelings, and a novel wants ultimately to ask questions. It doesn't assert anything, or shouldn't, I think.
Nicole KraussHe held my hand and told me a story about when he was six and threw a rock at a kid's head who was bullying his brother, and how after that no one had bothered either of them again. 'You have to stick up for yourself,' he told me. 'But it's bad to throw rocks,' I said. 'I know. You're smarter than me. You'll find something better than rocks.
Nicole KraussI want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. 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. It was standing outside, and I invited it in.
Nicole KraussI forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.
Nicole KraussAnd it's like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway across the world, only this was the opposite of disaster, how by accident she saved me with that thoughtless act of grace, and she never knew, and how that, too, is the part of the history of love.
Nicole KraussI won't waste your time with the injuries of my childhood, with my loneliness, or the fear and sadness of the years I spent inside my parents' marriage, under the reign of my father's rage, afer all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?
Nicole KraussI knew that to find and to feel Yoav again would be terribly painful, because of what had become of him, and because of what I knew he could ignite in me, a vitality that was excruciating because like a flare it lit up the emptiness inside me and exposed what I always secretly knew about myself: how much time I'd spent being only partly alive, and how easily I'd accepted a lesser life.
Nicole Krauss