It’s not a very long life, is it, Max? You’re a kid, it’s summer, you blink your eyes and years - years - have passed. And you realize that you’ve become someone else, but that your heart is still caught in that lost kid. That what you’re left with beating in your chest is a diminished thing, a shadow of what it was when you were a boy and running under the night sky you felt it was filled to bursting.

— Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room

Her name was a sound you could go through, coming out the other side onto an identical place, Anna, a mirror image, a double echo in which there was nothing to grasp unto…Anna, backward or forward, the name a ghost of itself.

— Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room

He struggled against the urge to call Anna. He wanted to hear her voice, to test out how it sounded in the hollow space of the desert, to perform his own experiments on the nature of absence. But something in him didn’t want to give in to it, didn’t want to admit to whatever else it was that made him want to call her. In the end he picked up the phone and dialed anyway. She wasn’t home. It was nine o’clock at night in New York, too late for her to be at work and too early for her to be asleep, which meant she was somewhere out in the glowing city.

— Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room

To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and 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

It was beautiful, the ambition of it, the freehand interpretation of a city. From such a height, the knowledge of the small, simultaneous faraway was comforting: people dialing the operator, swallowing pills, breaking off romances, signing their names. Twelve million people inhabiting one of the most volatile places on earth, naturally disastrous, prone to flood and fire. Sharing wavelengths. Ten-four, you’re breaking up, come in.

— 

Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room

I think the phrase “freehand interpretation of a city” fits Los Angeles quite well.

You watch a lot of movies? Because it unsettles even people who live in L.A.; the nagging sense that they’ve seen a part of the city before, exactly like this.

— Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room

The gestures we repeat over and over, they’re just our need to be recognized…I mean that without them we would be unidentifiable. We’d have to reinvent ourselves every minute.

— Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room