Man Walks into a Room Quotes

“You fall in love, it's intoxicating, an 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. Only it doesn't last and soon you realize you can only get so close and you end up brutally disappointed, more alone than ever, because the illusion-the hope you'd held on to all those years-has been shattered.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“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.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“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?”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“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."

[…]
"I don't know. 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 thing you'll never be lonely again. Only it doesn't last and soon you realize you can only get so close, and you end up brutally disappointed, more alone that ever, because the illusion - the hope you'd held on to all those years - has been shattered."

[…]

"But see, the incredible thing about people is that we forget." Ray continued. "Time passes and somehow the hope creeps back and sooner or later someone else comes along and we think this is the one. And the whole thing starts all over again. We go through our lives like that, and either we just accept the lesser relationship - it may not be total understanding, but it's pretty good - or we keep trying for that perfect union, trying and failing, leaving behind us a trail of broken hearts, our own included. In the end, we die as alone as we were born, having struggled to understand others, to make ourselves understood, but having failed in what we once imagined was possible.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“How was it possible to wake up every day and be recognizable to another when so often one was barely recognizable to oneself?”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“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.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“But see, the incredible thing about people is that we forget," Ray continued. "Time passes and somehow the hope creeps back and sooner or later someone else comes along all over again. We go through our lives like that, and either we just accept the lesser relationship -- it may not be total understanding, but it's pretty good -- or we keep trying for the perfect union, trying and failing, leaving behind us a trail of broken hearts, our own included. In the end, we die as alone as we were born, having struggled to understand others, to make ourselves understood, but having failed in what we once imagined was possible.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“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.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“He could hear Donald saying something else but it didn't matter anymore what, because then and there it occurred to him that maybe the emptiness he'd been living with all this time hadn't really been emptiness at all, but loneliness gone unrecognized. How can a mind know how alone it is until it brushes up against some other mind? A single mark had been made, another person's memory imposed onto his mind, and now the magnitude of his own loss was impossible for Samson to ignore. It was breathtaking. He sank to his knees...It was as if a match had been struck, throwing light on just how dark it was.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“At night the sky is pure astronomy.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“When you're 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 it clear the impassable distance between you.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“The woman who later became his wife was sleeping in his bed, her face buried in the pillows and her feet crossed on top of each other like a child's. He watched her sleep and struggled to see her as she was, but what he saw instead were her muscles and bones. He saw right through the skin to where her femur connected to her tibia by way of the ligaments, to the hair web of nerves and the delicate forest of her lungs, to the abstract heart pumping blood through her arteries. It terrified him how easily these systems could fail her.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“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.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“The malpractice for advice-giving is like five times as much as a craniotomy.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“The kiss stayed there with no place to go, no sensory reserve that could absorb it and file it away as a common act of intimacy, a thousand times received. He knew what Anna was asking: whether you could love someone without habits.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“It would mark the end of a year that he might look back on as hands, a pivot between two lines. Or not: maybe enough time, would pass that eventually he would look back on his life, all of it, as a series of events both logical and continuous.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“Somewhere in the far north of Canada there wuld be snow, falling soundlessly overy the Beaufort Sea, falling over the Artic without a soul to see it. What kind of weather was that, Samson wondered, and how was one to use this information except as proof that the world was too much to bear?”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“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.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“The sun rises in glory as if it had yet to invent the desert.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“Between two words in a book Samson's memory had vanished.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“His memory had abandoned him, and though he had searched within himself all these weeks, he could find no desire to have it returned. If it came back now, he felt he would turn it away, and the knowledge of this renouncement, a small act of defiance, gave him a feeling of liberty.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“FROM THE AIR there seems to be a system: recognizable designs, networks on the desert floor. Crosshatches of ridge and fissure. Lines that fan out from the source. The shadow of the airplane slips across basin and range. Frost forms between the plane’s double windows, each geometric crystal an argument for the stillborn beauty of pure math. Eventually the cut of a road appears, as deep as a fossil in shale. Unbound by destination, a road simply for the sake of moving, however slowly, through miles of nothing. Through the system. The first grid is the strangest, the geometry of better living etched onto the desert floor: identical houses of a planned community pleated around the nucleus of a swimming pool. One and then another, until the desert is paved under streets and scattered with countless pools like a deck of blue cards.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“He watched the old man sleep and felt the vast loneliness of the world, the loneliness passed from person to person like a beach ball at a rock concert, kept aloft at all costs, and this was his moment to shoulder it. Or maybe it was his own personal loneliness, a solitary, errant longing no one else could ever know, and the knowledge of this stoked the already existing loneliness, made it widen and blur at the edges until it included everything.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“The city hurt to look at, all angles and glints of sun like shattered glass.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“There were certain places he always seemed to return to, squares or street corners, like refrains, points of convergence where the city doubled back on itself before escaping again around the corner.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“What I lost is, in the grand scope of things, almost... negligible. It's true that there's grief: it wakes me in a cold sweat thinking,, Who was I? What did I care about? What did I find funny sad, stupid, painful? Was I happy? All of those memories I accumulated, gone. Which one, if there could have been only one, would I have kept?”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“You know, sometimes I get the feeling that we're just a bunch of habits," she said. "The gestures we repeat over and over, they're just our need to be recognized." Her eyes were fixed on the TV, as if she was reading subtitles. I mean that without them we would be unidentifiable. We'd have to reinvent ourselves every minute.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room

“He trusted her because she cared for him and there was no one else.”
― Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room