When you are young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close -- as close as you can get -- to another person only makes clear that impassable distance between you.' If being in love only made people more lonely, why would everyone want it so much?' Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it's intoxicating, and for a little while you feel like you've actually become one with the other person. Merged souls and so on. You think you'll never be lonely again.
Interpretation
Love does not eliminate loneliness; instead, it often highlights the emotional distance between individuals.
In this quote, Nicole Krauss reflects on the complexity of love and relationships, noting that while love brings an initial sense of unity and connection, it can often lead to deeper feelings of loneliness as one realizes the inherent separateness between individuals. The intoxication of falling in love may create an illusion of merging souls, but ultimately, it reveals that true closeness cannot fully bridge emotional distances.
In practice
During a speech about the complexities of love at a relationship seminar.
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.
Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and the sea is not within sight; that in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.
I always felt like I was a freak when I was growing up and that there was something wrong with me because I couldn't fit in anywhere.
In all our contacts it is probably the sense of being really needed and wanted which gives us the greatest satisfaction and creates the most lasting bond.
I was in control of what people thought of me, but I had no control over what they thought of my mother. When I asked my mother, 'How do I tell people about you?' her answer was, 'Tell the truth'. But of course, the truth is never simple.
Our beloved ones have not 'gone to a far country.' It is only the veil of sense that separates them from us, and even that veil grows thin when our thoughts reach out to them.
Marriage is a series of desperate arguments people feel passionately about.
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