If I had a camera," I said, "I'd take a picture of you every day. That way I'd remember how you looked every single day of your life."
"I look exactly the same."
"No, you don't. You're changing all the time. Every day a tiny bit. If I could, I'd keep a record of it all."
"If you're so smart, how did I change today?"
"You got a fraction of a millimeter taller, for one thing. Your hair grew a fraction of a millimeter longer. And your breasts grew a fraction of a—"
"They did not!"
"Yes, they did."
"Did NOT."
"Did too."
"What else, you big pig?"
"You got a little happier and also a little sadder."
"Meaning they cancel out each other, leaving me exactly the same."
"Not at all. The fact that you got a little happier today doesn't change the fact that you also become a little sadder. Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you're the happiest and the saddest you've ever been in your whole life."
"How do you know?"
"Think about it. Have you ever been happier or sadder than right now, lying here in this grass?"
"I guess not. No."
"And have you ever been sadder?"
"No."
"It isn't like that for everyone, you know. Some people[...]"
"What about you? Are you the happiest and saddest right now that you've ever
been?"
"Of course I am."
"Why?"
"Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.
Tags: happiness romance sadness cute
...we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.
Nicole KraussI’ve always liked the feeling of traveling light; there is something in me that wants to feel I could leave wherever I am, at any time, without any effort. The idea of being weighed down made me uneasy, as if I lived on the surface of a frozen lake and each new trapping of domestic life - a pot, a chair, a lamp - threatened to be the thing that sent me through the ice.
Nicole Krauss...I continued to sit there hour after hour watching the unrelenting rain slosh against the glass, thinking of our life together, Lotte's and mine, how everything in it was designed to give a sense of permanence, the chair against the wall that was there when we went to sleep and there again when we awoke, the little habits that quoted from the day before and predicted the day to come, though in truth it was all just an illusion, just as solid matter is an illusion, just as our bodies are an illusion, pretending to be one thing when really they are millions upon millions of atoms coming and going, some arriving while others are leaving us forever, as if each of us were only a great train station, only not even that since at least in a train station the stones and the tracks and the glass roof stay still while everything else rushes through it, no, it was worse than that, more like a giant empty field where every day a circus erected and dismantled itself, the whole thing from top to bottom, but never the same circus, so what hope did we really have of ever making sense of ourselves, let alone one another?
Nicole KraussTags: life
. . . she gave him one of those broad smiles she reserved for strangers, as if she were aware of being able to pass, in their eyes, for an ordinary woman.
Nicole KraussTags: strangers
I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.
Nicole KraussOnly later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.
Nicole KraussTags: motherhood
...our eyes locked in one of those looks that sometimes happen between strangers, when both wordlessly agree that reality contains sinkholes whose depths neither can ever hope to fathom.
Nicole KraussIn life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.
Nicole KraussThe moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces.
Nicole Krauss« first previous
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