"I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity."
— Paul Auster (Moon Palace)

"Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them."
— Paul Auster

"We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
"
— Paul Auster

"(...) when a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists."
— Paul Auster (The Brooklyn Follies: A Novel)

"And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is."
— Paul Auster

"It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not."
— Paul Auster

"All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are."
— Paul Auster (The Brooklyn Follies: A Novel)

"Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within...By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. (City of Glass)
"
— Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room)

"One should never underestimate the power of books."
— Paul Auster (The Brooklyn Follies: A Novel)

"The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this."
— Paul Auster (The Invention of Solitude)

"Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on living on the moon for the rest of my life."
— Paul Auster

"We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since. "
— Paul Auster (Man in the Dark)

"You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky."
— Paul Auster

"Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head."
— Paul Auster (The Brooklyn Follies: A Novel)

"Every life is inexplicable. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that they did this and did that, that they married this person and had these children, that they lived, that they died, that they left behind these books or this battle or that bridge--none of that tells us very much"
— Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy)

"Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in the air. We all have it in us—every man, woman, and child—and with enough hard work and concentration, every human being is capable of…the feat….You must learn to stop being yourself. That’s where it begins, and everything else follows from that. You must let yourself evaporate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That’s how it’s done. The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground.
'Like so.'"
— Paul Auster (Mr. Vertigo)

"It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don't know half as much as I think I do."
— Paul Auster (Oracle Night: A Novel)

"Dismantling the architecture of my discontent"
— Paul Auster

"I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden, without the slightest flicker of a doubt, I understood that my life was my own, that it belonged to me and no one else.
I’m talking about freedom, Fogg. A sense of despair that becomes so great, so crushing, so catastrophic, that you have no choice but to be liberated by it. That’s the only choice, or else you crawl into a corner and die.
"
— Paul Auster (Moon Palace)

"Something happens, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise."
— Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy)

"He no longer wished to be dead. At the same time, it cannot be said that he was glad to be alive. But at least he did not resent it. He was alive, and the stubbornness of this fact had little by little begun to fascinate him - as if he had managed to outlive himself, as if he were somehow living a posthumous life."
— Paul Auster

"To feel estranged from language is to lose your own body."
— Paul Auster (Selected Poems)

"In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world. "
— Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy)

"In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life"
— Paul Auster

"Life got in the way -- two years in the army, work, marriage, family responsibilities, the need to earn more and more money, all the muck that bogs us down when we don't have the balls to stand up for ourselves -- but I had never lost my interest in books."
— Paul Auster (The Brooklyn Follies: A Novel)

"Existence was bigger than just life. It was everyone's life all together, and even if you lived in Buffalo, New York and had never been more than ten miles from home, you were part of the puzzle, too. It didn't matter how small your life was."
— Paul Auster (The Brooklyn Follies: A Novel)

"Nadie puede decir de dónde proviene un libro, y menos que nadie la persona que lo escribe. Los libros nacen de la ignorancia , y si continúan viviendo después de escritos es sólo en la medidad en que no pueden entenderse."
— Paul Auster (Leviathan)

"That's all I've ever dreamed of, Mr. Bones. To make the world a better place. To bring some beauty to the drab humdrum corners of the soul. You can do it with a toaster, you can do it with a poem, you can do it by reaching out your hand to a stranger. It doesn't matter what form it takes. To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do."
— Paul Auster (Timbuktu: A Novel)

"They had come to the end of what they could talk about. Beyond that point there was nothing: the random thoughts of men who knew nothing."
— Paul Auster (City of Glass)

"Toute la scène avait quelque chose d’imaginaire. J’étais conscient qu’elle était réelle, mais en même temps c’était mieux que la réalité, plus proche d’une projection de ce que j’attendais de la réalité que tout ce qui m’étais arrivé auparavant.

Avec le temps, je commençai à remarquer que les bonnes choses m’arrivaient que lorsque j’avais renoncé à les espérer."
— Paul Auster

"'Thoughts are real', he said. 'Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future'."
— Paul Auster (Oracle Night)

"The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence."
— Paul Auster (Travels in the Scriptorium: A Novel)

"He who lives for an encounter with the unseen becomes the instrument of the seen."
— Paul Auster

"-Significa que no puedes vivir sin los demás -dije-. Cuando están ahí en carne y hueso, el mundo real es suficiente. Cuando estás solo, tienes que inventarte personajes, los necesitas para que te hagan compañia."
— Paul Auster (Leviathan)

"Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since."
— Paul Auster

"He slipped away slowly, withdrawing from this world by small, imperceptible degrees, and in the end it was as if
he were a drop of water evaporating in the sun, shrinking and shrinking until at last he wasn’t there anymore."
— Paul Auster (Timbuktu: A Novel)

""Todo lo inanimado se desintegraba, todo lo viviente moría. Cada vez que pensaba en esto notaba latidos en la cabeza al imaginar los furiosos y acelrados movimientos de las moléculas, las incesantes explosiones de la materia, el hirviente caos oculto bajo la superficie de todas las cosas.""
— Paul Auster (Moon Palace)

"hameye ma dar barkhord ba gozashte chenin raftar mikonim,sagha va adamha"
— Paul Auster (Timbuktu: A Novel)

"Les moments de crise produsent un redoublement de vie chez les hommes.
Moments of crisis produce a redoubled vitality in men. Or, more succinctly perhaps: Men don't begin to live fully until thier backs are against the wall."
— Paul Auster (The Book of Illusions: A Novel)

"...once you fell in love with her, you
loved her until the day you died."
— Paul Auster (Timbuktu: A Novel)

"Mr. Bones had run into homeless dogs in the past, but he had never felt anything but pity for them—pity, and a touch of disdain. The loneliness of their lives was too brutal to contemplate, and he had always kept himself at a safe distance, wary of the ticks and fleas hidden in their fur, reluctant to get too close to them for
fear that the diseases and desperation they carried would rub off on him. Perhaps he had turned into a snob, but he could always recognize one of those abject creatures from a hundred yards away. They moved differently from other dogs, gliding along with that grim mendicant’s lope of theirs, the tail
cocked between their legs at quarter-mast, cantering down the avenues as if they were late for an appointment somewhere—when in fact they weren’t going anywhere, just traveling around in circles, lost in the limbo between one nowhere and the next."
— Paul Auster (Timbuktu: A Novel)

"But the truth is, friend, that dogs can read. Why else would they put those signs on the doors of post offices? NO
DOGS ALLOWED EXCEPT FOR SEEING-EYE DOGS."
— Paul Auster (Timbuktu: A Novel)

"El único acto íntimo entre dos extraños que todavía es posible, es el de la lectura"
— Paul Auster

"...it's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes--all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom"
— Paul Auster (The Brooklyn Follies: A Novel)

"The truth of the story lies in the details."
— Paul Auster

"Bit by bit, I found myself relaxing into the conversation. Kitty had a natural talent for drawing people out of themselves, and it was easy to fall in with her, to feel comfortable in her presence. As Uncle Victor had once told me long ago, a conversation is like having a catch with someone. A good partner tosses the ball directly into your glove, making it almost impossible for you to miss it; when he is on the receiving end, he catches everything sent his way, even the most errant and incompetent throws. That’s what Kitty did. She kept lobbing the ball straight into the pocket of my glove, and when I threw the ball back to her, she hauled in everything that was even remotely in her area: jumping up to spear balls that soared above her head, diving nimbly to her left or right, charging in to make tumbling, shoestring catches. More than that, her skill was such that she always made me feel that I had made those bad throws on purpose, as if my only object had been to make the game more amusing. She made me seem better than I was, and that strengthened my confidence, which in turn helped to make my throws less difficult for her to handle. In other words, I started talking to her rather than to myself, and the pleasure of it was greater than anything I had experienced in a long time."
— Paul Auster (Moon Palace)

"It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain."
— Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy)

"But that was the beauty of this particular game. The moment you lost, you won."
— Paul Auster (Timbuktu: A Novel)

"what at first had seemed to be no more than a small bump in the road was turned into a full-scale misfortune"
— Paul Auster (Timbuktu: A Novel)

"If I hit that tree with this stone, Rousseau says, all will go well in my life from now on. He throws and misses. That one didn't count, he says, so he picks up another stone and moves several yards closer to the tree. He misses again. That one didn't count either, he says, and then he moves still closer to the tree and finds another stone. Again he misses. That was just the final warm up toss, he says, it's the next one that really counts. But just to make sure, he walks right up to the tree this time, positioning himself directly in front of the tree. He is no more than a foot away from it by now, close enough to touch it with his hand. The he lobs the stone squarely against the trunk. Success, he says to himself, I've done it. From this moment on, life will be better for me than ever before.

Nashe found it amusing but at the same time he was too embarrassed by it to want to laugh. There was something terrible about such candor, finally, and he wondered where Rousseau had found the courage to reveal such a thing about himself, to admit to such naked self deception."
— Paul Auster