The History of Love: A Novel by Nicole Krauss

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Description

The illuminating national bestseller: "Vertiginously exciting…vibrantly imagined….<Krauss is> a prodigious talent."—Janet Maslin, New York Times A long-lost book reappears, mysteriously connecting an old man searching for his son and a girl seeking a cure for her widowed mother's... read more

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Memorable Quotes

“Sometime she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her.”
Alma Singer
“He picked my mother up on Friday nights while the other kibbutzniks lay on blankets under a giant movie screen on the grass, petting dogs and getting high. He drover her to the Dead Sea where they floated strangely.”
Alma Singer
“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.”
Alma Singer
“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.”
“There was a time when it wasn't uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations. Shy people carried a little bundle of string in their pockets, but people considered loudmouths had no less need for it, since those used to being overheard by everyone were often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by someone. The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometime the smaller the distance, the greater the need for the string.”
“The practise of attaching cups to the ends of the string came much later. Some say its is related to the irrepressible urge to press shells to our ears, to hear the still-surviving echo of the world's first expression. Others say it was started by a man who held the end of a string that was unraveled across the ocean by a girl who let for America.”
“He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence fill 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."”
Franz Kafka Is Dead, by Leopold Gursky
“Ladies and gentlemen. We are gathered here today to celebrate the mysteries of life. What? No, stone throwing is not allowed. Only flowers. Or money.”
Leopold Gursky
“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.”
Litvinoff
“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.”
Leopold Gursky