Nicole Krauss Quotes

I mangle phrases constantly. The other day I was chatting with my boyfriend and I said to him, 'He really sold him under the bus.' And he said, 'I think you meant 'threw him under the bus,' or 'sold him up the river.'

Why do we say something is out of whack? What is a whack?

What a strange expression said the herbalist who would compare themselves to chopped liver in the first place? If you have to to choose an organ why not pick a gallbladder or a thymus gland instead? Much more interesting than a liver. Or what about chopped t-

I don't know. Sometimes I try to say what's on my mind and it comes out sounding like I ate a dictionary and I'm shitting pages. Sorry

Old Marley was dead as a doornail... The wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile.

The aphorism is a slippery plaything.

You need to stop thinking with your head, Mud Boy, and start thinking with your heart.” Artemis sighed. The heart was an organ for pumping oxygen-rich blood to the cells. It could no more think than an apple could tap-dance.

Words can do wonderful things. They pound, purr. They can urge, they can wheedle, whip, whine. They can sing, sass, singe. They can churn, check, channelize. They can be a "Hup two three four." They can forge a fiery army of a hundred languid men.

What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

A single metaphor can give birth to love.

My weapon has always been language, and I've always used it, but it has changed. Instead of shaping the words like knives now, I think they're flowers, or bridges.

Silence isn't golden. It's yellow.

Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on. "I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know." "Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!

Metaphor is, as a common feature of linguistic practice, an incidental expediency, a homely administering of first-aid by mother-wit to jams or halts in expression suddenly confronting speakers, with no respectable linguistic solution immediately in sight.

That's American English for you: more roots than a mangrove swamp.

The whole "weak in the knees" thing,which she always thought was just some idiotic expression back from the golden age of idiotic expressions,was real. -Suite Scarlett

When someone asks you, A penny for your thoughts, and you put your two cents in, what happens to the other penny?

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.

Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense.

You know," Glen Bateman said, looking out toward Grand Junction in the early light of morning, "I've heard the saying 'That sucks' for years without really being sure of what it meant. Now I think I know.

I'm fairy godmothering a girl who sounds like something you put up in the rain.

A writer lives in awe of words, for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.

The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor.

What a pity it is that there are so many words! Whenever one wants to say anything, three or four ways of saying it run into one's head together and one can't tell which to choose. It is as troublesome and puzzling as choosing a ribbon ... or a husband.