Nicole Krauss Quotes

My mother cooked her last Christmas standing rib roast in 1987 and died a few weeks afterward.

If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.

I am never going to be able to rest easy in having established a posthumous connection to my father. I'll always be groping for what I can't have.

Yes, my mother's death is a terrible sorrow to me. I feel - do you know what I mean - the silence of it so. She was more alive than anyone I have ever known.

I press my ear against his chest, to the spot where I always rest my head, where I know I will hear the strong and steady beat of his heart. Instead, I find silence.

it was important to him that i know who she was, so im glad for that. but it makes me sad too. they loved each other so much, and now she's gone. it doesn't seem fair.

You count the hours you could have spent with your mother. It's a lifetime in itself.

I will never have a photograph of her to carry around in my pocket. I will never have a letter in her handwriting, or a scrap-book of everything we've done. I will never share an apartment with her in the city. I will never know if we are listening to the same song at the same time. We will not grow old together. I will not be the person she calls when she's in trouble. She will not be the person I call when I have stories to tell. I will never be able to keep anything she's given to me.

Can I tell you something? It wasn't so bad. Not so bad at all right then, me scowling at the dirt, James in his bed, the way it always always was. Look, if that's all that happened, if his dying just meant that I would be waiting for him to say something instead of listening to him say something, it would have been fine.

Sometimes you can only feel something by its absence. By the empty spaces it leaves behind.

I regret that I should leave this world without again beholding him.

Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body. It's not fair, I think, and I get this petulant wish for ugly flowers and mourners, my mother's old familiar grief. Somebody I love to tend my future grave. Probably this is the wrong thing to be wishing for.

I could try to pretend that I didn't care anymore, but it could never be true again. You can't just make yourself matter, and then die, Alaska, because now, I am irretrievably different, and I'm sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice.

After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can't bring back anything to life.

When the show's not around any more, it's going to be hard not to have her in my life.

Absence from whom we love is worse than death, and frustrates hope severer than despair.

I wish my father had lived longer. He died when I was 18.

I'm incredibly sad that my mother's not here to see my kids and that my kids don't get to know her. And she didn't meet my husband. That's one of the hardest things. I don't even know how to put that into words.

Absence and death are the same - only that in death there is no suffering.

We all have that burning question about what happens if we lose somebody we love, especially if we lose them tragically. We wonder what fear was going on, we wonder if we could have reached out and touched them, held their hand, looked in their eyes, been there.

Not to be weird, but I still have an ongoing relationship with my mom, even though she passed away, and I've been surprised at how much I've been able to convey to her. Now I sound like a total weirdo, but that's true.

I try not to spend too much time with regret, although I wish I'd had more hang time with my dad.

If I didn't like someone, I wouldn't want him calling me up when I was dying. I wouldn't want them having regrets that they didn't talk to me.

I envy the dead.

There has been the biggest black cloud following me around. People believe it's all my fault that Steve is not here. He has always had an open door, and he doesn't choose to do this any more.