Nicole Krauss Quotes

When you're a kid, you think you can jump out the window and be okay. But when you get older, you think, "Wait a minute - I can't fly!"

The biggest misconception people have about me is that I'm in control of every situation. I'm rarely in control of any situation.

It turns out that we were all wrong

I understand the difference between perception and reality.

I thought that because I wasn't a sickly person - I never have been - I thought I was healthy. So I assumed health. I didn't have it.

In my youth I, too, entertained some illusions; but I soon recovered from them.

The first service a child doth his father is to make him foolish.

I refuse to be misled by any kind of a mirage about any alleged success of what I write. Those things are too easily exaggerated, and even when they are true, they always mean less than they seem to.

Welcome to adulthood." Cob said. "Every child finds a day when the realize that adults can be weak and wrong just like everyone else. After that day, you are an adult. Like it or not.

An illusion dissipated is an experience gained.

I was an only child growing up, and my father passed away when I was twelve, so for most of my life, it was just me and my momma. We were really, really close. Learning to live in the world without her has been incredibly hard. At first, it didn't make any sense - how to do it, to live without her - but you slowly get somewhat used to it.

Some authority on parenting once said, "Hold them very close and then let them go." This is the hardest truth for a father to learn: that his children are continuously growing up and moving away from him (until, of course, they move back in).

I am not at all the sort of person you and I took me for.

When I was a child at sixteen, I was just a child. All sixteen year-olds are just children. As much as we like them to be adults, they are just children. And like all children, they need their mother, and they need their father. All children need their mother and their father. All children are entitled to their mother and their father.

I've given myself a bit more of a break in that I can't say yes to everything. I have to prioritize, and obviously it starts with your children. But I used to be much later on the list. I've started putting myself within a safe distance from that first priority. You just have to remind yourself to not forget about your relationship and to not forget about yourself. And it's interesting, because I have a very fraught relationship with working out.

A son is a promise that time makes to a man,the guarantee every father receives that whatever he holds dear will someday be considered foolish, and that person he loves best in the world will misunderstand him.

I feel like now I have an amazing wife, a super smart child and the opportunity to create in two major fields. Before I had those outlets, my ego was all I had.

I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.

We need kids to remind us of how incredible this world is. People are increasingly losing their childhoods too soon, and that's a danger. There's a prophesy somewhere that at a certain point in history, children will be gray. It's weird to think about, but it's possible.

Trouble comes looking for you. Lots of times I just stay in the house and enjoy my family. I try to be a father to my child, I'll stay out of trouble if I can, because I have lots to do. Other folks have different hardships. It's hard for a black man to raise a family.

Don't think you are looking at me because you are not.

There is no passion that so much transports men from their right judgments as anger. No one would demur upon punishing a judge with death who should condemn a criminal upon the account of his own choler; why then should fathers and pedants be any more allowed to whip and chastise children in their anger? It is then no longer correction bat revenge. Chastisement is instead of physic to children; and should we suffer a physician who should be animated against and enraged at his patient?

The parents always insisted on telling their child that their secret friends didn't exist - perhaps because they had forgotten that they too had spoken to their angel at one time. Or, who knows, perhaps they thought they lived in a world where there was no longer any place for angels.

Really life is about narcissism; no one is ever thinking about you much. You always think people are thinking about you way more than they are.

Growing up, I didn't know about families who were missing a father, because there weren't any in our neighborhood. Today over a third of American children are born into single-parent homes. Is this all men's doing?