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Book: Man Walks Into a Room
Quotes of Book: Man Walks Into a Room

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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Nicole Krauss _ Man Walks Into a Room
Who's that woman?" Samson asked, sitting in the chair the doctor motioned to. "Who?""In the hall, like she's possessed.""Marietta? She has Tourette's, a very severe case. It makes her tic like that. She has an overpowering impulse to mimic whatever she sees." Lavell lifted a stubby finger and rubbed his eyebrow. "A colleague of mine, smart guy, wrote a case study of her. Whether the individual Marietta truly exists or if the impulses, so all-consuming, make her just a phantasmagoria of a person.
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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.
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Nicole Krauss _ Man Walks Into a Room
The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.
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Nicole Krauss _ Man Walks Into a Room
He trusted her because she cared for him and there was no one else.
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Nicole Krauss _ Man Walks Into a Room
The city hurt to look at, all angles and glints of sun like shattered glass.
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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.
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Nicole Krauss _ Man Walks Into a Room
Once, coming out of the cool, dark lab into the heat of the desert sun, he'd briefly wondered if the emptiness he'd been so staunchly guarding was, not the absence of memory, but actually a memory itself: a recollection of the blazing white potential that had existed before he was born. The emptiness an infant possesses in the very first moments, when consciousness begins like the answer to a question never asked.
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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.
book-quote memory-loss