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Book: Forest Dark
Quotes of Book: Forest Dark

Nicole Krauss _ Forest Dark
When my sons asked the reason for my trip, I said that I needed to conduct research for my book. What is it about? the younger one asked. He was constantly writing stories, as many as three a day, and would not have been troubled by such a question concerning his own writing. For a long time he'd spelled the words as he thought they might be spelled, without any spaces between them, which, like the Torah's unbroken string of letters, opened his writing to infinite interpretations. He had only begun to ask us how things were spelled once he'd started to use the electric typewriter he was given for his birthday, as if it were the machine that had demanded it of him-the machine, with its air of professionalism and the reproach of its giant space bar, that required that what was written on it be understood. But my son himself remained ambivalent about the matter. When he wrote by hand, he returned to his old habits.
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Nicole Krauss _ Forest Dark
there was stored substrata along
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Nicole Krauss _ Forest Dark
But in the end, it isn't up to the writer to decide how his or her work will be used.
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Nicole Krauss _ Forest Dark
No one ever inhabited the threshold more thoroughly than Kafka. On the threshold of happiness; of the beyond; of Canaan; of the door only open for us. On the threshold of escape, of transformation. Of an enormous and final understanding. No one made so much art of it. And yet if Kafka is never sinister or nihilistic, it's because to even reach the threshold requires a susceptibility to hope and vivid yearning. There is a door. There's a way up or over. It's just that one almost certainly won't manage to reach it, or recognize it, or pass through it in this life.
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Nicole Krauss _ Forest Dark
One is always in the hold of the world, but one doesn't physically feel it's hold, doesn't account for its effect. Cannot draw comfort from the hold of the world, which registers only as a neutral emptiness. But the sea one feels. And so surrounded, so steadily held, so gently rocked - so differently organized - one's thoughts come in another form.
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Nicole Krauss _ Forest Dark
Sometimes, reading to my children at night, the perverse thought would come to me that in rehashing for them the same fairy stories, Bible stories, and myths, I was not giving them a gift but rather taking something from them. Night after night i was instructing them in convention. Here are the various forms life can take, I was telling them. And yet i still remembered the time when my older son's mind did not produce known forms or follow familiar patterns, when his urgent strange questions about the world revealed it anew to us. We saw his perspective as a form of brilliance and yet went on educating him in the conventional forms, even while they chafed us."
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Nicole Krauss _ Forest Dark
Doesn't part of the awe that fills us when we confront the unknown come from understanding that, should it at last flood into us and become known, we would be altered? In our view of the stars, we find a measure of our own incompleteness, our still-yet unfinishedness, which is to say, our potential for change, even transformation. That our species is distinguished from others by our hunger and capacity for change has everything to do with our ability to recognize the limits of our understanding, and to contemplate the unfathomable."
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Nicole Krauss _ Forest Dark
When I woke again, it was into a homesickness that felt physical, as its symptoms had been physical for seventeenth-century mercenary soldiers who'd fallen ill from being so far from home, the first to be diagnosed with the disease of nostalgia. Though never so acute, the longing for something formless and unnamed, had been with me since I was a child. Though now I want to say that the division I felt was, in a sense, within me: the division of being both here and not here, but rather there.
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Nicole Krauss _ Forest Dark
When I awoke again it was in a homesickness that felt physical, as its symptoms had been physical for seventeenth-century-century mercenary soldiers who'd fallen ill from being so far from home, the first to be diagnosed with the disease of nostalgia. Though never so acute, the longing for something I felt divided from, which was neither a time nor a place was but something formless and unnamed, had been with me since I was a child. Though now I want to say that the division I felt was, in a sense, within me: the division of being both here and not here, but rather there.
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Nicole Krauss _ Forest Dark
When I was young, I thought that I would live my life as freely as the writers and artists I took as my heroes. But in the end I wasn't brave enough to resist the current pulling me toward convention.
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Nicole Krauss _ Forest Dark
And yet isn't it true of all of us? That there are things we feel to be at the heart of our nature that are not borne out by the evidence around us, and so, to protect our delicate sense of integrity, we elect, however unconsciously, to see the world other than the way it really is? And sometimes it leads to transcendence, and sometimes it leads to the unconscionable.
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Nicole Krauss _ Forest Dark
Childhood is a process of slowly recomposing oneself out of the borrowed materials of the world.
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