Getting a book published made me feel a little bit sad... I felt driven by the need to write a book, rather than the need to write. I needed to figure out what was important to me as a writer.
Interpretation
The author reflects on the emotional complexities of publishing a book, suggesting that the act of writing is more important than the end result.
In this quote, Nicole Krauss expresses a bittersweet realization that while achieving the milestone of getting a book published is significant, it also brought feelings of sadness. This suggests that the drive to create for the sake of expression and personal significance can sometimes be overshadowed by external pressures and expectations associated with publication. Krauss emphasizes the importance of understanding one's true motivations as a writer beyond just the finished product.
In practice
In a speech about creativity, one could reference this quote to illustrate the emotional journey of artists.
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.
For her I changed pebbles into diamonds, shoes into mirrors, I changed glass into water, I gave her wings and pulled birds from her ears and in her pockets she found the feathers, I asked a pear to become a pineapple, a pineapple to become a lightbulb, a lightbulb to become the moon, and the moon to become a coin I flipped for her love.
Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.
I’ve always liked the feeling of traveling light; there is something in me that wants to feel I could leave wherever I am, at any time, without any effort. The idea of being weighed down made me uneasy, as if I lived on the surface of a frozen lake and each new trapping of domestic life - a pot, a chair, a lamp - threatened to be the thing that sent me through the ice.
When we went into the ocean, I watched his body as he dove into the waves, and it gave me a feeling in my stomach that wasn't an ache but something different.
Herman slipped his hand into mine, and I thought, An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand, and the next thing that happened was we kissed each other, and I found I knew how, and I felt happy and sad in equal parts, because I knew that I was falling in love, but it wasn't with him.
My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.
Use anger to emotionalize whatever thing you intend to do in life - being a painter, a poet or a photographer
The biggest thrill you can have is to tell people one of your songs, and have them be able to hum it.
The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.
Nothing is more odious than music without hidden meaning.
No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will.
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