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Now We'd Known Each Other For Two Years, The Side Of My Calf Was Touching His Shins, And His Stomach Was Against My Ribs. He Said, "i Don't Think It's End Of World To Be My Girlfriend." I Opened My Mouth, But Nothing Came Out. It Took Seven Languages To Make Me; It Would Be Nice If I Could Have Spoken Just One.

-Nicole Krauss

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Now We'd Known Each

Nicole Krauss

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Now We'd Known Each Other For Two Years, The Side Of My Calf Was Touching His Shins, And His Stomach Was Against My Ribs. He Said, "i Don't Think It's End Of World To Be My Girlfriend." I Opened My Mouth, But Nothing Came Out. It Took Seven Languages To Make Me; It Would Be Nice If I Could Have Spoken Just One.

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I Think Of Novels As Houses. You Live In Them Over The Course Of A Long Period, Both As A Reader And As A Writer.

Holding Hands, For Example, Is A Way To Remember How It Feels To Say Nothing Together.

My First Novel, 'man Walks Into A Room,' Is About A Man Who's Lost His Memory And Has To Start A Second Life. On One Level, It's About How We Create A Coherent Sense Of Self.

I Forced Myself To Picture The Last Moments. The Penultimate Breath. A Final Sigh. And Yet. It Was Always Followed By Another.

I Left The Library. Crossing The Street, I Was Hit Head-on By A Brutal Loneliness. I Felt Dark And Hollow. Abandoned, Unnoticed, Forgotten, I Stood On The Sidewalk, A Nothing, A Gatherer Of Dust. People Hurried Past Me. And Everyone Who Walked By Was Happier Than I. I Felt The Old Envy. I Would Have Given Anything To Be One Of Them.

The Clarity Was Startling And Samson Wondered Whether He Was Imagining These Moments. Not That They Hadn't Happened At All, But That They Had Been Embellished By Details From Elsewhere, Fragments That Survived The Obliteration Of Other Memories, Vagrant Data That Gravitated And Stuck To What Was Left To Remember. But In The End He Rejected This Idea. The Memories Were Too Perfect: Take One Detail Away And They Collapsed Into Disorder.

When I Got Older I Decided I Wanted To Be A Real Writer. I Tried To Write About Real Things. I Wanted To Describe The World, Because To Live In An Undescribed World Was Too Lonely.

I Have Realised Just How Important It Is To Readers To Feel That Fictional Stories Are Based On Reality.

Fictional Stories

In One's Youth, One Has Tremendous Access To One's Feelings. And As One Gets Older, Some Of Those Feelings Kind Of Drift Away. But So Much More Happens To You. There's More At Stake In Life.

Sometimes I Forget That The World Is Not On The Same Schedule As I. That Everything Is Not Dying, Or That If It Is Dying It Will Return To Life, What With A Little Sun And The Usual Encouragement.

Sometimes No Length Of String Is Long Enough To Say The Thing That Needs To Be Said. In Such Cases All The String Can Do, In Whatever Its Form, Is Conduct A Person's Silence.

When I Was With Yoav, Everything In Me That Had Been Sitting Stood Up. He Had A Way Of Looking At Me With A Kind Of Unabashed Directness That Made Me Shiver. It's Something Amazing To Feel That For The First Time Someone Is Seeing You As You Really Are, Not As They Wish You, Or You Wish Yourself, To Be.

Even Among The Angels, There Is The Sadness Of Division.

I Like To Think The World Wasn't Ready For Me, But Maybe The Truth Is That I Wasn't Ready For The World. I've Always Arrived Too Late For My Life.

When We Went Into The Ocean, I Watched His Body As He Dove Into The Waves, And It Gave Me A Feeling In My Stomach That Wasn't An Ache But Something Different.

Lonely People Are Always Up In The Middle Of The Night.

...the Plural Of Elf Is Elves! What A Language! What A World!

Except For When I Was Very Little And Thought That Being An "engineer" Meant He Drove A Train. Then I Imagined Him In The Seat Of An Engine Car The Color Of Coal, A String Of Shiny Passenger Cars Trailing Behind. One Day My Father Laughed And Corrected Me. Everything Snapped Into Focus. It's One Of Those Unforgettable Moments That Happen As A Child, When You Discover That All Along The World Has Been Betraying You.

I Feel Really Strongly About Not Wanting To Overly Guide The Reader About What He Or She Should Think. I Really Trust The Reader To Know For Themselves And Not To Need Too Much. You Have Your Own Imagination, Your Own Experiences, Your Own Feelings, And A Novel Wants Ultimately To Ask Questions. It Doesn't Assert Anything, Or Shouldn't, I Think.

Now We'd Known Each Other For Two Years, The Side Of My Calf Was Touching His Shins, And His Stomach Was Against My Ribs. He Said, "i Don't Think It's End Of World To Be My Girlfriend." I Opened My Mouth, But Nothing Came Out. It Took Seven Languages To Make Me; It Would Be Nice If I Could Have Spoken Just One.

An Average Of Seventy-four Species Become Extinct Every Day, Which Was One Good Reason But Not The Only One To Hold Someone's Hand.

I Walked Down My Snow Covered Street. Out Of Habit I Turned And Checked For My Footsteps. When I Arrived At My Building I Looked For My Name On The Buzzers. And Because I Know That Sometimes I See Things That Aren't There, After Dinner I Called Information To Ask If I Was Listed.(25)

. . . I Would Have Let Him Go One Finger At A Time, Until, Without His Realizing, He'd Be Floating Without Me. And Then I Thought, Perhaps That Is What It Means To Be A [parent] - To Teach Your Child To Live Without You.

Then I Turned The Page And At The Top It Said Things I Miss About M And There Was A List Of 15 Things, And The First Was The Way He Holds Things. I Did Not Understand How You Can Miss The Way Somebody Holds Things.

Don’t You See?” I Said. “he Could Change Every Detail, But He Couldn’t Change Her.” “but Why?” His Obtuseness Frustrated Me. “because He Was In Love With Her!” I Said. “because, To Him, She Was The Only Thing That Was Real.

In The Beginning It Was Always The Same. But. I Kept Trying. Then One Day I Accidentally Moved As The Shutter Clicked. A Shadow Appeared. The Next Time I Saw The Outline Of My Face, And A Few Weeks Later My Face Itself. It Was The Opposite Of Disappearing.

For Her I Changed Pebbles Into Diamonds, Shoes Into Mirrors, I Changed Glass Into Water, I Gave Her Wings And Pulled Birds From Her Ears And In Her Pockets She Found The Feathers, I Asked A Pear To Become A Pineapple, A Pineapple To Become A Lightbulb, A Lightbulb To Become The Moon, And The Moon To Become A Coin I Flipped For Her Love.

A Couple Months After My Heart Attack, Fifty-seven Years After I'd Given It Up, I Started To Write Again. I Did It For Myself Alone, Not For Anyone Else, And That Was The Difference. It Didn't Matter If I Found The Words, And More Than That, I Knew It Would Be Impossible To Find The Right Ones.

I Was Never A Man Of Great Ambition I Cried Too Easily I Didn't Have A Head For Science Words Often Failed Me While Others Prayed I Only Moved My Lips

She Was Gone, And All That Was Left Was The Space Where You'd Grown Around Her, Like A Tree That Grows Around A Fence.

You’re Lost In Your Own World, In The Things That Happen There, And You’ve Locked All The Doors. Sometimes I Look At You Sleeping. I Wake Up And Look At You And I Feel Closer To You When You’re Like That, Unguarded, Than When You’re Awake. When You’re Awake You’re Like Someone With Her Eyes Closed, Watching A Movie On The Inside Of Your Eyelids. I Can’t Reach You Anymore. Once Upon A Time I Could, But Not Now, And Not For A Long Time.

What About You? Are You 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.

The Fact That You Got A Little Happier Today Doesn't Change The Fact That You Also Became 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 Saddest You've Ever Been In Your Whole Life.

He Learned To Live With The Truth. Not To Accept It, But To Live With It.

If The Book Is A Mystery To Its Author As She's Writing, Inevitably It's Going To Be A Mystery To The Reader As He Or She Reads It.

Forests, Which I Think Do Contain A Lot Mystery And Traditionally Are The Setting For Lawlessness And Magic And What Is Outside Of The Rational To Some Degree, Are Still Something More Finite. I Guess The Desert And Its Crushing Sense Of Infinite Space Is Part Of Its Connection To The Mystical - On Top Of Making You Dehydrated And Therefore Primed For Visions.

The Accolades, Just Like The Scrapes And Bruises, Fade In The End, And All You're Left With Is Your Ambition.

... As A Rule Of Thumb, Whenever There Appears A Plural, Correct For A Singular. Should I Ever Let Slip A Royal We, Put Me Out Of My Misery With A Swift Blow To The Head.

The Death Of Leopold Gursky Leopold Gursky Started Dying On August 18, 1920. He Died Learning To Walk. He Died Standing At The Blackboard. And Once, Also, Carrying A Heavy Tray. He Died Practicing A New Way To Sign His Name. Opening A Window. Washing His Genitals In The Bath. He Died Alone, Because He Was Too Embarrassed To Phone Anyone. Or He Died Thinking About Alma. Or When He Chose Not To.

And He Isn't Crying For Her, Not For His Grandma, He's Crying For Himself: That He: Too, Is Going To Die One Day. And Before That His Friends Wil Die, And The Friends Of His Friends, And, As Time Passes, The Children Of His Friends, And, If His Fate Is Truly Bitter, His Own Children. (58)

After All Who Doesn't Wish To Make A Spectacle Of Their Loneliness

History Of Love

Sometimes Just To Paint A Head You Have To Give Up The Whole Figure. To Paint A Leaf, You Have To Sacrifice The Whole Landscape. It Might Seem Like You're Limiting Yourself At First, But After A While You Realize That Having A Quarter Of An Inch Of Something You Have A Better Chance Of Holding On To A Certain Feeling Of The Universe Than If You Pretended To Be Doing The Whole Sky.

All The Times I Have Suddenly Realized That My Parents Are Dead, Even Now, It Still Surprises Me, To Exist In The World While That Which Made Me Has Ceased To Exist

I Know There Is A Moral To This Story, But I Don't Know What It Is.

The Book Forest Dark Wants To Provoke Questions About What Is Reality And Why Are We So Given To Believe That Reality Is Firm And Unbendable. There's A Whole Host Of Questions That The Book Is Asking About That. Why Do We Believe That The World Is Only One Way And As We See It? Why Are We Not Open To The Ways In Which It Might Be Otherwise.

Part Of The Work Of Writing A Novel Is To Uncover The Symmetries Or Connections That Make It Whole, Which Might Not Reveal Itself At First.

I Am Always Coming Up With Architectural Metaphors When I Think About Writing. But I Think One Of The Things That Draw Us To Literature Is That It Gives Us This Very Attractive Illusion That There Is Meaning In The World - Things Connect.

Because Of The Illusion. You Fall In Love, It's Intoxicating, And For A Little While, You Actually Feel Like You've Become One With The Other Person, Merged Souls And So On. You Think You'll Never Be Lonely Again.

Falling In Love

Loneliness: There Is No Organ That Can Take It All.

Tell Me, Was I The Sort Of Person Who Took Your Elbow When Cars Passed On The Street, Touched Your Cheek While You Talked, Combed Your Wet Hair, Stopped By The Side Of The Road In The Country To Point Out Certain Constellations, Standing Behind You So That You Had The Advantage Of Leaning And Looking Up?

I Knew That To Find And To Feel Yoav Again Would Be Terribly Painful, Because Of What Had Become Of Him, And Because Of What I Knew He Could Ignite In Me, A Vitality That Was Excruciating Because Like A Flare It Lit Up The Emptiness Inside Me And Exposed What I Always Secretly Knew About Myself: How Much Time I'd Spent Being Only Partly Alive, And How Easily I'd Accepted A Lesser Life.

The Rhyme Always Knows Better Than You, And Leads You To Places Where You Wouldn't Otherwise Have Gotten To And That Is Absolutely The Case. Leading Off From Formal Poetry, There Is Something About When You Pay Attention To Form And You Allow It To Have Its Own Laws And You Listen To Those Laws You Really Do End Up In Places You Wouldn't Otherwise Go. Which Isn't To Say That I Believe In Following The Rules When I Write. I Don't. Each Of The Forms In My Books Feels To Me New.

Alone In My Room, Wrapped In A Blanket, I Whimpered And Talked Aloud To Myself, Recalling The Lost Glory Of My Youth When I Considered Myself, And Was Considered By Others, A Bright And Capable Person. It Seemed That Was All Gone Now.

I’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.

Herman Slipped His Hand Into Mine, And I Thought, An Average Of Seventy-four Species Become Extinct Every Day, Which Was One Good Reason But Not The Only One To Hold Someone's Hand, And The Next Thing That Happened Was We Kissed Each Other, And I Found I Knew How, And I Felt Happy And Sad In Equal Parts, Because I Knew That I Was Falling In Love, But It Wasn't With Him.

He Learned To Live With The Truth. Not To Accept It, But To Live With It. It Was Like Living With An Elephant. His Room Was Tiny, And Every Morning He Had To Squeeze Around The Truth Just To Get To The Bathroom. To Reach The Armoire To Get A Pair Of Underpants He Had To Crawl Under The Truth, Praying It Wouldn't Choose That Moment To Sit On His Face. At Night, When He Closed His Eyes, He Felt It Looming Above Him.

It's One Of Those Unforgettable Moments That Happen As A Child, When You Discover That All Along The World Has Been Betraying You.

Unforgettable Moments

Perhaps That Is What It Means To Be A Father - To Teach Your Child To Live Without You.

There Are So Many Ways To Be Alive, But Only One Way To Be Dead.

Wittgenstein Once Wrote That When The Eye Sees Something Beautiful, The Hand Wants To Draw It. I Wish I Could Draw You.

The Oldest Emotion In The World May Be That Of Being Moved; But To Describe It-just To Name It-must Have Been Like Trying To Catch Something Invisible.

Why Does One Begin To Write? Because She Feels Misunderstood, I Guess. Because It Never Comes Out Clearly Enough When She Tries To Speak. Because She Wants To Rephrase The World, To Take It In And Give It Back Again Differently, So That Everything Is Used And Nothing Is Lost. Because It's Something To Do To Pass The Time Until She Is Old Enough To Experience The Things She Writes About.

...we Take Comfort In The Symmetries We Find In Life Because They Suggest A Design Where There Is None.

In Life We Sit At The Table And Refuse To Eat, And In Death We Are Eternally Hungry.

There's No Match For The Silence Of God.

When At Last I Came Upon The Right Book, The Feeling Was Violent: It Blew Open A Hole In Me That Made Life More Dangerous Because I Couldn't Control What Came Through It.

I Finally Understood That No Matter What I Did, Or Who I Found, I-he-none Of Us-would Ever Be Able To Win Over The Memories She Had Of Dad, Memories That Soothed Her Even While They Made Her Sad, Because She'd Built A World Out Of Them She Knew How To Survive On Even If No One Else Could.

It Is Impossible To Distrust One's Writing Without Awakening A Deeper Distrust In Oneself.

I Always Wrote Little Things When I Was Younger. My First Opus Was A Book Of Poems Put Down In A Spiral Notebook At Five Or Six, Handsomely Accompanied By Crayon Illustrations.

I'm Very Interested In Structure, How Multiple Stories Are Assembled In Different Ways; That Is What Memory Does As Well.

I Scowled At The World. And The World Scowled Back. We Were Locked In A Stare Of Mutual Disgust.

For Me, What I Am Making In The Novel Is A Place To Live. When I First Switched From Poetry To Novels, I Was Asked Why, And The Metaphor I Came Up With Was About Poems As Rooms. You Can Make A Room Perfect, But Then You Have To Shut The Door And Never Go Back, Whereas A Novel Is Like A House - It Can Never Be Perfect, But You Can Make A Life In It.

The Truth Is That She Told Me She Couldn't Love Me. When She Said Goodbye, She Was Saying Goodbye Forever. And Yet. I Made Myself Forget. I Don't Know Why. I Keep Asking Myself. But I Did.

...after All, Who Isn't A Survivor From The Wreck Of Childhood?

Domestic Violence

And If The Man Who Once Upon A Time Had Been A Boy Who Promised He'd Never Fall In Love With Another Girl As Long As He Lived Kept His Promise, It Wasn't Because He Was Stubborn Or Even Loyal. He Couldn't Help It.

Falling In Love

I'm Not Immune To The Readers' Desires. Sometimes They Are My Own, Because I'm A Reader, Too. The Readers' Desire To Know What Really Happened And What Didn't. To Have A Glimpse Into What's Really The Author And What Isn't. I Think We All Have That And I Wonder About What It Means.

David Grossman May Be The Most Gifted Writer I've Ever Read. [to The End Of The Land Is] Powerful, Shattering, And Unflinching. To Read It Is To Have Yourself Taken Apart, Undone, Touched At The Place Of Your Own Essence.

Only 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.

At Night The Sky Is Pure Astronomy.

He Wondered If What He Had Taken For The Richness Of Silence Was Really The Poverty Of Never Being Heard [...]. How Could He Have Forgotten What He Had Always Known: There Is No Match For The Silence Of God.

Obviously I've Been Reading Kafka For A Long Long Time, Since I Was Really Young, And Even Before I Ever Read Him I Knew Who He Was. I Had This Weird Sense That He Was Some Kind Of Family. Like Uncle Kafka. Now I Really Think Of Him That Way, The Way We Think About An Uncle Who Opened Up Some Path For Being In A Family That Otherwise Wouldn't Have Existed. I Think Of Him That Way As A Writer And A Familial Figure.

The Idea That We've Outgrown Ends Up Limiting Us And We Have To Make A Choice About What We're Going To Do In Our Lives.

The Unique Thing That Literature Provides Is To Be Able To Step So Fully Into Another Situation And Condition.

One Thing I Am Never Going To Do When I Grow Up Is Fall In Love, Drop Out Of College, Learn To Subsist On Water And Air, Have A Species Named After Me, And Ruin My Life.

Falling In Love

...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.

Even Now, All Possible Feelings Do Not Yet Exist, There Are Still Those That Lie Beyond Our Capacity And Our Imagination. From Time To Time, When A Piece Of Music No One Has Ever Written Or A Painting No One Has Ever Painted, Or Something Else Impossible To Predict, Fathom Or Yet Describe Takes Place, A New Feeling Enters The World. And Then, For The Millionth Time In The History Of Feeling, The Heart Surges And Absorbs The Impact.

Getting A Book Published Made Me Feel A Little Bit Sad... I Felt Driven By The Need To Write A Book, Rather Than The Need To Write. I Needed To Figure Out What Was Important To Me As A Writer.

And So He Did The Hardest Thing He’d Ever Done In His Life: He Picked Up His Hat And Walked Away.

Now That Mine Is Almost Over, I Can Say That The One Thing That Struck Me Most About Life Is The Capacity For Change. One Day You're A Person And The Next Day They Tell You You're A Dog. At First It's Hard To Bear, But After A While You Learn Not To Look At It As A Loss. There's Even A Moment When It Becomes Exhilarating To Realize Just How Little Needs To Stay The Same For You To Continue The Effort They Call, For Lack Of A Better Word, Being Human.

Once Upon A Time There Was A Boy Who Loved A Girl, And Her Laughter Was A Question He Wanted To Spend His Whole Life Answering.

The More Freedom I Allow Myself As A Writer To Wander, Become Lost And Go Into Uncertain Territory - And I Am Always Trying To Go To The More Awkward Place, The More Difficult Place - The More Frightening It Is, Because I Have No Plan.

I Opened My Mouth, But Nothing Came Out. It Took Seven Languages To Make Me; It Would Be Nice If I Could Have Spoken Just One.

I Wished To Punish Her For Her Intolerable Stoicism, Which Made It Impossible For Me To Ever Be Truly Needed By Her In The Most Profound Ways A Person Can Need Another, A Need That Often Goes By The Name Of Love.

I Think A Lot Of The Questions - Questioning Reality And The Self And The Desire To Change, To Me Are Always At The Heart Of Life. No Matter How Old You Are, To Me Life Is Always About Changing And Growing And Discovering And That's Not Always Easy.

The Shop Owner Did Not Try To Push The Book On Any Of Her Customers. She Knew That In The Wrong Hands Such A Book Could Easily Be Dismissed, Or, Worse, Go Unread. Instead She Let It Sit Where It Was In The Hope That The Right Reader Might Discover It.

To Touch And Feel Each Thing In The World, To Know It By Sight And By Name, And Then To Know It With Your Eyes Closed So That When Something Is Gone, It Can Be Recognized By The Shape Of Its Absence. So That You Can Continue To Possess The Lost, Because Absence Is The Only Constant Thing. Because You Can Get Free Of Everything Except The Space Where Things Have Been.

For Me, The Most Powerful Way To Write About Something Is Through The Absence Of It. Rather Than Writing About What It Was To Become A New Mother, I Wrote, For Example, A Father Facing Death And Addressing His Estranged Son About The Regrets Of His Relationship.

I Think In The Whole Field Of Questions About What We Take To Be "real," One Of Those Questions Is About The Self. When You Talk About The Self We're Always Talking About Whether It's A Construction And It's A Construction We're Always In The Process Of Working On. I Don't Think That Work Ever Ends, To Some Degree.

The Malpractice For Advice-giving Is Like Five Times As Much As A Craniotomy.

He Spoke Of Human Solitude, About The Intrinsic Loneliness Of A Sophisticated Mind, One That Is Capable Of Reason And Poetry But Which Grasps At Straws When It Comes To Understanding Another, A Mind Aware Of The Impossibility Of Absolute Understanding. The Difficulty Of Having A Mind That Understands That It Will Always Be Misunderstood.

When The Word 'nostalgia' Was Coined In The 18th Century, It Was Used To Describe A Pathology - Not So Much A Sense Of Lost Time, But A Severe Homesickness.

That's What I Do. Watch Movies And Read. Sometimes I Even Pretend To Write, But I'm Not Fooling Anyone. Oh, And I Go To The Mailbox.

Because You Can Get Free Of Everything Except The Space Where Things Have Been

At The End, All That's Left Of You Are Your Possessions. Perhaps That's Why I've Never Been Able To Throw Anything Away. Perhaps That's Why I Hoarded The World: With The Hope That When I Died, The Sum Total Of My Things Would Suggest A Life Larger Than The One I Lived.

History Of Love

We Met Each Other When We Were Young, Before We Knew Enough About Disappointment, And Once We Did We Found We Reminded Each Other Of It.

The Moment Had Passed, The Door Between The Lives We Could Have Led And The Lives We Led Had Shut In Our Faces.

Why Are We So Addicted To Factual Knowledge? Why Are We So Uncomfortable With The Unknown? Is It Something About The Anxiety Of Our Time? Because Of Course That Wasn't Always The Way. Even Now The Whole Idea Of The Rational Individual Has Been Subject To Question And Yet We Still Cling To This Idea Of Factual, Rational Knowledge Being More Valuable Than Whatever Its Opposite Might Be.

Sometimes I Thought About Nothing And Sometimes I Thought About My Life. At Least I Made A Living. What Kind Of Living? A Living. It Wasn't Easy. I Found Out How Little Is Unbearable.

One Is Always Changing. I Don't Want To Write The Same Book And I Couldn't, Because I'm A Different Person.

Once Upon A Time There Was A Boy Who Lived In A House Across The Field From A Girl Who No Longer Exists. They Made Up A Thousand Games. She Was Queen And He Was King. In The Autumn Light, Her Hair Shone Like A Crown. They Collected The World In Small Handfuls. When The Sky Grew Dark They Parted With Leaves In Their Hair.

So Many Words Get Lost. They Leave The Mouthand Lose Their Courage, Wandering Aimlessly Until They Are Swept Into The Gutter Like Dead Leaves. On Rainy Days You Can Hear Their Chorus Rushing Past.

He Held My Hand And Told Me A Story About When He Was Six And Threw A Rock At A Kid's Head Who Was Bullying His Brother, And How After That No One Had Bothered Either Of Them Again. 'you Have To Stick Up For Yourself,' He Told Me. 'but It's Bad To Throw Rocks,' I Said. 'i Know. You're Smarter Than Me. You'll Find Something Better Than Rocks.

She Struggled With Her Sadness, But Tried To Conceal It, To Divide It Into Smaller And Smaller Parts And Scatter These In Places She Thought No One Would Find Them.

When You Are Young, You Think It's Going To Be Solved By Love. But It Never Is. Being Close -- As Close As You Can Get -- To Another Person Only Makes Clear That Impassable Distance Between You.' If Being In Love Only Made People More Lonely, Why Would Everyone Want It So Much?' Because Of The Illusion. You Fall In Love, It's Intoxicating, And For A Little While You Feel Like You've Actually Become One With The Other Person. Merged Souls And So On. You Think You'll Never Be Lonely Again.

Falling In Love

Our Kiss Was Niticlimactic. It Wasn't That The Kiss Was Bad, But It Was Just A Note Of Punctuation In Our Long Conversation, A Parenthetical Remark Made In Order To Assure Each Other Of A Deeply Felt Agreement, A Mutual Offer Of Companionship, Which Is So Much More Rare Than Sexual Passion Or Even Love.

Sometimes I Get The Feeling That We're Just A Bunch Of Habits. The Gestures We Repeat Over And Over, They're Just Our Need To Be Recognized. Without Them, We'd Be Unidentifiable. We Have To Reinvent Ourselves Every Minute.

Only Now That My Son Was Gone Did I Realize How Much I'd Been Living For Him. When I Woke Up In The Morning It Was Because He Existed, And When I Ordered Food It Was Because He Existed, And When I Wrote My Book It Was Because He Existed To Read It.

The Price We Paid For The Volumes Of Ourselves That We Suffocated In The Dark.

Empty Teacups Gathered Around Her And Dictionary Pages Fell At Her Feet.

Part Of Me Is Made Of Glass, And Also, I Love You.

History Of Love

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 Won't Waste Your Time With The Injuries Of My Childhood, With My Loneliness, Or The Fear And Sadness Of The Years I Spent Inside My Parents' Marriage, Under The Reign Of My Father's Rage, Afer All, Who Isn't A Survivor From The Wreck Of Childhood?

Bruno, My Old Faithful. I Haven't Sufficiently Described Him. Is It Enough To Say He Is Indescribable? No. Better To Try And Fail Than Not To Try At All.

I Read Like An Animal. I Read Under The Covers, I Read Lying In The Grass, I Read At The Dinner Table. While Other People Were Talking To Me, I Read.

There Are Moments When A Kind Of Clarity Comes Over You, And Suddenly You Can See Through Walls To Another Dimension That You'd Forgotten Or Chosen To Ignore In Order To Continue Living With The Various Illusions That Make Life, Particularily Life With Other People, Possible.

It's Strange What The Heart Can Do When The Mind Is Giving The Directions.

At The Most Simplistic Level Physicists Tell Us That What We See As Reality Is Not Actually Accurate. A Rock Looks Solid To Us But It's Full Of Empty Space And Atoms Moving And We See It As Solid Because We Need To Because It Helps Us Survive, Right? Survival Being Our Goal. You Can Extrapolate That To Many Other Things.

But Loneliness, True Loneliness, Is Impossible To Accustom Oneself To, And While I Was Still Young I Thought Of My Situation As Somehow Temporary, And Did Not Stop Hoping And Imagining That I Would Meet Someone And Fall In Love...yes, There Was A Time Before I Closed Myself Off To Others.

Falling In Love

Franz Kafka Is Dead. He Died In A Tree From Which He Wouldn't Come Down. "come Down!" They Cried To Him. "come Down! Come Down!" Silence Filled The Night, And The Night Filled The Silence, While They Waited For Kafka To Speak. "i Can't," He Finally Said, With A Note Of Wistfulness. "why?" They Cried. Stars Spilled Across The Black Sky. "because Then You'll Stop Asking For Me."

("let's Stand Under A Tree," She Said. "why?" "because It's Nicer." "maybe You Should Sit On A Chair, And I'll Stand Above You, Like They Always Do With Husbands And Wives." "that's Stupid." "why's It Stupid?" "because We're Not Married." "should We Hold Hands?" "we Can't." "but Why?" "because, People Will Know." "know What?" "about Us." "so What If They Know?" "it's Better When It's A Secret." "why?" "so No One Can Take It From Us.")

I Do Realize That The Reader Needs Some Form Of Resolution. Sometimes I Think Of It Almost Like Writing A Musical Score Where Things Have To Harmonize And Certain Lines Have To Come To A Close.

No, I Don't Harbor Any Mystical Ideas About Writing, Your Honor, It's Work Like Any Other Kind Of Craft; The Power Of Literature, I've Always Thought, Lies In How Willful The Act Of Making It Is.

He Died Alone Because He Was Too Embarrassed To Phone Anyone.

...larger Than Life...i've Never Understood That Expression. What's Larger Than Life?

Larger Than Life

What Interests Me Very Much As A Writer Is The Ability For Writing To Have Our Lives To Be Occupied So Vividly By Others. I Think That's What We Long For As Writers.

Life In General In My Experience Gets Deeper And Deeper, More And More Profound, More And More Complex, The Older One Gets.

I'm The Opposite Of Someone Like David Grossman, Who Knows How His Characters Walk, And How They Smell. I Don't Allow Myself To Imagine What Mine Look Like At All. My Sense Of Them Comes From The Inside. They Remain, By Necessity, Physically Vague In My Mind.

Without Memories To Cloud It, The Mind Perceives With Absolute Clarity. Each Observation Stands Out In Stark Relief. In The Beginning, When There's Not Yet A Smudge, The Slate Still Blank, There Is Only The Present Moment: Each Vital Detail, Shocked Color, The Fall Of Light. Like Film Stills. The Mind Relentlessly Open To The World, Deeply Impressed, Even Hurt By It: Not Yet Gauzed By Memory.

You're Looking For Ways Always As The Writer To Bring Readers Into Intimacy, You With Them With You. Photos Can Sometimes Do The Opposite, Create Distance And Perspective, But These Somehow Didn't. They Somehow Bring The Reader Closer.

I Used To Think That If I Had A Choice Between Writing Well And Living Well, I Would Choose The Former. But Now I Think That's Sheer Lunacy. Writing Weighs So Much Less, In The Great Cosmic Equation, Than Living.

What Interests Me In Writing A Novel Is Taking Really Remote Voices, Characters, And Stories And Beginning To Create Some Kind Of Web.

There Is A Fallacy That The Powerful Emotion Of Youth Mellows With Time. Not True. One Learns To Control And Suppress It. But It Doesn't Lessen. It Simply Hides And Concentrates Itself In More Discreet Places. When One Accidentally Stumbles Into One Of These Abysses, The Pain Is Spectacular.

At Times I Believed That The Last Page Of My Book And The Last Page Of My Life Were One And The Same, That When My Book Ended I'd End, A Great Wind Would Sweep Through My Rooms Carrying The Pages Away, And When The Air Cleared Of All Those Fluttering White Sheets The Room Would Be Silent, The Chair Where I Sat Empty.

If At Large Gatherings Or Parties, Or Around People With Whom You Feel Distant, Your Hands Sometimes Hang Awkwardly At The Ends Of Your Arms - I You Find Yourself At A Loss For What Do With Them, Overcome With Sadness That Comes When You Recognize The Foreignnes Of Your Own Body - It's Because Your Hands Remember A Time When The Division Between Mind And Body, Brain And Heart, What's Inside And What's Outside, Was So Much Less.

There Are Two Types Of People In The World: Those Who Prefer To Be Sad Among Others, And Those Who Prefer To Be Sad Alone.

Maybe The First Time You Saw Her You Were Ten. She Was Standing In The Sun Scratching Her Legs. Or Tracing Letters In The Dirt With A Stick. Her Hair Was Being Pulled. Or She Was Pulling Someone's Hair. And A Part Of You Was Drawn To Her, And A Part Of You Resisted--wanting To Ride Off On Your Bicycle, Kick A Stone, Remain Uncomplicated. In The Same Breath You Felt The Strength Of A Man, And A Self-pity That Made You Feel Small And Hurt. Part Of You Thought: Please Don't Look At Me. If You Don't, I Can Still Turn Away. And Part Of You Thought: Look At Me.

There Were Many Things They Simply Didn't Talk About: Between Them, Silence Was Not So Much A Form Of Evasion As A Way For Solitary People To Exist In A Family.

All I Want Is Not To Die On A Day When I Went Unseen.

History Of Love

I Have Always Written About Characters Who Fall Somewhere In The Spectrum Between Solitary And Totally Alienated.

No, What I Felt Was The Torment Of Waiting, Stuck Between The End Of One Sentence And The Beginning Of The Next Which Might Or Might Not Bring A Hail Storm, Plane Crash, Poetic Justice, Or A Miraculous Reversal.

There Was No One To Call Me To Bed, No One To Demand That The Rhythms Of My Life Operate In A Duet.

I Take Almost No Notes When I Write. I Have One Notebook - This Old Green Leather Notebook That My Dad Gave Me A Decade Ago.

I Try To Make A Point Of Being Seen. Sometimes When I'm Out, I'll Buy A Juice Even When I'm Not Thirsty. If The Store Is Crowded I'll Even Go So Far As Dropping Change All Over The Floor, Nickels And Dimes Skidding In Every Direction. All I Want Is Not To Die On A Day I Went Unseen.

To Walk Into A Modern-day Bookstore Is A Little Bit Like Studying A Single Photograph Out Of The Infinite Number Of Photographs That Cold Be Taken Of The World: It Offers The Reader A Frame.

How Was It Possible To Wake Up Every Day And Be Recognizable To Another When So Often One Was Barely Recognizable To Oneself?

. . . 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.

All My Life I Have Arrived Early Only To Find Myself Standing Self-consciously On A Corner, Outside A Door, In An Empty Room, But The Closer I Get To Death The Earlier I Arrive, The Longer I Am Content To Wait, Perhaps To Give Myself The False Sensation That There Is Too Much Time Rather Than Not Enough.

We Move Through The Day Like Two Hands Of A Clock: Sometimes We Overlap For A Moment, Then Come Apart Again, Carrying On Alone. Everyday Exactly The Same: The Tea, The Burnt Toast, The Crumbs, The Silence.

When Will You Learn That There Isn't A Word For Everything?

I Smiled Back, The Importance Of Manners, My Mother Always Said, Is Inversely Related To How Inclined One Is To Use Them, Or, In Other Words, Sometimes Politeness Is All That Stands Between Oneself And Madness.

The Misery Of Other People Is Only An Abstraction Something That Can Be Sympathized With Only By Drawing From One's Own Experiences. But As It Stands, True Empathy Remains Impossible. And So Long As It Is, People Will Continue To Suffer The Pressure Of Their Seemingly Singular Existence.

When You're Younger, It's All Theoretical. It's All Potential. As You Get Older, It Becomes Actual, And Your Life Gets Filled With Unexpected Complexity; Some Of It Asked For, And Some Of It Not. It Becomes Richer, I Find.

Every Year, The Memories I Have Of My Father Become More Faint, Unclear, And Distant. Once They Were Vivid And True, Then They Became Like Photographs, And Now They Are More Like Photographs Of Photographs.

After She Left Everything Fell Apart. No Jew Was Safe. There Were Rumors Of Unfathomable Things, And Because We Couldn't Fathom Them We Failed To Believe Them, Until We Had No Choice And It Was Too Late. P 8

She Was Gone, And All That Was Left Was The Space You'd Grown Around Her, Like A Tree That Grows Around A Fence. For A Long Time, It Remained Hollow. Years, Maybe. And When At Last It Was Filled Again, You Knew That The New Love You Felt For A Woman Would Have Been Impossible Without Alma. If It Weren't For Her, There Would Never Have Been An Empty Space, Or The Need To Fill It.

We Search For Patterns, You See, Only To Find Where The Patterns Break. And It’s There, In That Fissure, That We Pitch Our Tents And Wait.

That He Liked To Think Of Himself As A Philosopher. That He Questioned All Things, Even The Most Simple, To The Extent That When Someone Passing Him On The Street Raised His Hat And Said, 'good Day,' Litvinoff Often Paused So Long To Weigh Evidence That By The Time He'd Settled On An Answer The Person Had Gone On His Way, Leaving Him Standing Alone.

I Read Differently Now, More Painstakingly, Knowing I Am Probably Revisiting The Books I Love For The Last Time. (245)

I Have A Very Strong Sense Of Architecture In My Novels. But At First It's Sometimes Like Building A Doorknob Before You Have A Door, And A Door Before You Have A Room.

I Want To Say Somewhere: I've Tried To Be Forgiving. And Yet. There Were Times In My Life, Whole Years, When Anger Got The Better Of Me. Ugliness Turned Me Inside Out. There Was A Certain Satisfaction In Bitterness. I Courted It. It Was Standing Outside, And I Invited It In.

That Powers My Desire To Write: The Sense Of How Quickly Everything On The Surface Of Life Can Be Cut Away And You Can Suddenly Be Inside The Most Inner Part Of The Most Inner Life Of A Person. What Does It Feel Like There, And What Are The Regrets And Sensations And Longings, And What Is The Music Of It?

One Of Us Had Loved The Other More Perfectly, Had Watched The Other More Closely, And One Of Us Listened And The Other Hadn’t, And One Of Us Held On To The Ambition Of The One Idea Far Longer Than Was Reasonable, Whereas The Other, Passing A Garbage Can One Night, Had Casually Thrown It Away.

There Are Times When The Kindness Of Strangers Only Makes Things Worse Because One Realizes How Badly One Is In Need Of Kindness And That The Only Source Is A Stranger.

To Hike Out Alone In The Desert; To Sleep On The Valley Floor On A Night With No Moon, In The Pitch Black, Just Listening To The Boom Of Silence: You Can't Imagine What That's Like.

If It Weren't For Her, There Would Never Have Been An Empty Space, Or The Need To Fill It.

I've Reached The Age Where Bruises Are Formed From Failures Within Rather Than Accidents Without.

Later - When Things Happened That They Could Never Have Imagined - She Wrote Him A Letter That Said: When Will You Learn That There Isn't A Word For Everything

Sometimes, Waking Early Before The Others, Wandering The Rooms Wrapped In A Blanket Or Drinking My Tea In The Empty Kitchen, I Had That Most Rare Of Feelings, The Sense That The World, So Consistently Overwhelming And Incomprehensible, In Fact Has An Order, Oblique As It May Seem, And I A Place Within It.

In Nature Forms Are Endlessly Being Destroyed And Then Recreated And Destroyed And Recreated. Nature Isn't Afraid To Destroy Forms In The Process Of Regenerating. So Why Are We Afraid Of That In Life?

At First Babel Longed For The Use Of Just Two Words: Yes And No. But He Knew That Just To Utter A Single Word Would Be To Destroy The Delicate Fluency Of Silence.

Once Upon A Time You Were A Fish. How Do You Know? Because I Was Also A Fish. You, Too? Sure. A Long Time Ago. Anyway, Being A Fish, You Knew How To Swim. You Were A Great Swimmer. A Champion Swimmer, You Were. You Loved The Water. Why? What Do You Mean, Why? Why Did I Love The Water? Because It Was Your Life! And As We Talked, I Would Have Let Him Go One Finger At A Time, Until, Without His Realizing, He'd Be Floating Without Me. Perhaps That Is What It Means To Be A Father-to Teach Your Child To Live Without You.

What Is Literature, Really? Boiled Down To A Single Sentence, I'd Say It's This: An Endless Conversation About What It Means To Be Human. And To Read Literature Is To Engage In That Conversation.

She [my Mother] Was The Force Around Which Our World Turned. My Mother Was Propelled Through The Universe By The Brute Force Of Reason. She Was The Judge In All Our Arguments. One Disapproving Word From Her Was Enough To Send Us Off To Hide In A Corner, Where We Would Cry And Fantasize Our Own Martyrdom. And Yet. One Kiss Could Restore Us To Princedom. Without Her, Our Lives Would Dissolve Into Chaos.

You Can't Imagine How Hard I Am On Myself. Nothing Pummels Me Like My Own Doubts, The Feeling Of How Far I Still Have To Go.

To Me, This Is The Singular Privilege Of Reading Literature: We Are Allowed To Step Into Another's Life.

And It's Like Some Tiny Nothing That Sets Off A Natural Disaster Halfway Across The World, Only This Was The Opposite Of Disaster, How By Accident She Saved Me With That Thoughtless Act Of Grace, And She Never Knew, And How That, Too, Is The Part Of The History Of Love.

Better To Try And Fail Than Not To Try At All

The Truth Is The Thing I Invented So I Could Live.

History Of Love

The Truth Was I'd Given Up Waiting Long Ago. The Moment Had Passed, The Door Between The Lives We Could Have Led And The Lives We Led Had Shut In Our Faces. Or Better To Say, In My Face. Grammar Of My Life: As A Rule Of Thumb, Wherever There Appears A Plural, Correct For Singular. Should I Ever Let Slip A Royal We, Put Me Out Of My Misery With A Swift Blow To The Head.

Mom?" I Said. She Turned. "can I Talk To You About Something?" "of Course, Darling. Come Here." I Took A Few Steps Into The Room. There Was So Much I Wanted To Say. "i Need You To Be --" I Said, And Then I Started To Cry. "be What?" She Said, Opening Her Arms. "not Sad," I Said.

Then He Almost But Didn't Say The Two Sentence He'd Been Meaning To Say For Years: Part Of Me Is Made Of Glass, And Also, I Love You

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Marilynne Robinson

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