Nicole Krauss Quotes

Breaking apart from someone you love very much can be unbearably painful, but finding yourself again can be a beautiful thing if you do your solitude right.

I don't think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost.

The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.

This is not what anyone wants to hear, just like somebody who wants to lose weight doesn't want to hear 'diet and exercise,' but I think giving yourself time and abstaining from interaction is the only way to get over somebody.

Time takes away the grief of men.

If you've got to my age, you've probably had your heart broken many times. So it's not that difficult to unpack a bit of grief from some little corner of your heart and cry over it.

Most of us need time to work through pain and loss. We can find all manner of reasons for postponing forgiveness. One of these reasons is waiting for the wrongdoers to repent before we forgive them. Yet such a delay causes us to forfeit the peace and happiness that could be ours.

People talk about grief as if it's kind of an unremittingly awful thing, and it is. It is painful, but it's a very, very interesting sort of thing to go through, and it really helps you out. At the end of the day, it gets you through because you have to reform your relationship, and you have to figure out a way of getting to the future.

I barely saw my mother, and the mom I saw was often angry and unhappy. The mother I grew up with is not the mother I know now. It's not the mother she became after my father died, and that's been the greatest prize of my life.

I will never be able to move on as much as people would like me to.

You can't shut down. You can't say, 'What can I do to make this go away?' You have to let it be painful and get through it. Every day gets better. Because when you're in love, you kind of give everything and make that person your life. So every day, you get more and more of yourself back, and it feels better.

I have friends who have lost husbands and have gone off and tried different things. Nothing wrong with that.

I think, for other people who have lost someone and have loved again, it's a beautiful thing. But it's just not really on my horizon.

A lot of the songs are based on my previous relationship. It didn't work out. I lost him, and it ruined me. I had to learn to get back on my feet. I used that heartbreak to create something really beautiful.

My brother dying changed me. I didn't realize how strong I was until I lost my brother.

The emptiness where I used pain to fill the hole no longer controls me, no longer calls me because of you.

After you married, Crispin, she said, my heart was broken. I will not deny it. But I did not slip into a sort of suspended life that would be forever gray and meaningless if you did not somehow come back to me. I put back the pieces of my heart and kept on living. I am not the woman I was when I was in love with you and expecting to marry you. I am not the woman I was when I heard that you were married. I am the woman I have become in the five years since then, and she is a totally different person. I like her. I wish to continue living her life.

It's like my garden, love. Everything grows. Including love. And with that growing everyday how can you expect missing her to ever fade away? Everything builds, including our ability to cope with it. That's how we keep going.

Cripple crow say something for our grieving, where do we go once we start leaving. Well close that wound or else keep on bleeding and change your tune, it's got no meaning.

While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave, the most so far, because she found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of her capacity to move on.

And if you think that you're showing your love to Catherine by suffering the way you've been doing, then somewhere along the way, I must have messed up in raising you." "You didn't mess up...." "I must have. Because when I look at you, I see myself, and to be honest, I'd rather see someone different. I'd like to see someone who learned that it's okay to go on, that it's okay to find someone that can make you happy. But right now, it's like I'm looking in the mirror and seeing myself twenty years ago.

The worst of it is over now, and I can't say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss—you have gone and lost something else. But the body moves toward health. The mind, too, in steps. One step at a time. Ask a mother who has just lost a child, How many children do you have? "Four," she will say, "—three," and years later, "Three," she will say, "—four.

That's what I realized: if I did get her back somehow, she wouldn't fill the hole that losing her created.

Empty Spaces:After his father died he carried his life more gently & left an empty space for the birds & other creatures.