The History of Love

by Nicole Krauss

All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen.

Is it enough to say he is indescribable? No. Better to try and fail than not to try at all.

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.

When your pants are down around your ankles, that’s when everyone arrives.

I wanted to explain, Believe me, I’d never mistake myself for anyone special.

At first my mother kept everything exactly as he left it. According to Misha Shklovsky, that’s what they do with famous writers’ houses in Russia.

The Age of Glass followed the Stone Age as an evolutionary corrective, introducing into human relations a new sense of fragility that fostered compassion.

These things were lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone ever taking the time to write it all down.

There were times when a finger might have been lifted to scratch a nose, and if casual eye contact was made with one’s lover just then, the lover might accidentally take it to be the gesture, not at all dissimilar, for Now I realize I was wrong to love you. These mistakes were heartbreaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because they didn’t go around with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said, they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they’d understood correctly.

Because of the frequency of these mistakes, over time the gesture for asking forgiveness evolved into the simplest form. Just to open your palm was to say: Forgive me.

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—if you find yourself at a loss for what do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness 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.

Grammar of my life: as a rule of thumb, wherever there appears a plural, correct for singular.

As the rifles were pointed at his chest he wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard.