Paul Auster > Quotes

“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

“It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.”
― Paul Auster

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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.”
― Paul Auster, City of Glass

“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

“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

“You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.”
― 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

“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

“One should never underestimate the power of books.”
― Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

“Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. 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 he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge – none of that tells us very much.”
― Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

“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

“We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since. ”
― Paul Auster, Man in the Dark

“No one was to blame for what happened, but that does not make it any less difficult to accept. It was all a matter of missed connections, bad timing, blundering in the dark. We were always in the right place at the wrong time, the wrong place at the right time, always just missing each other, always just a few inches from figuring the whole thing out. That's what the story boils down to, I think. A series of lost chances. All the pieces were there from the beginning, but no one knew how to put them together.”
― Paul Auster, Moon Palace

“Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.”
― Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

“The truth of the story lies in the details.”
― Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

“We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.”
― Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions

“In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where 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

“You're too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.”
― Paul Auster

“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

“And now we come to the hard part. The endings, the farewells, the famous last words. If you don't hear from me often, Phileas, remember that you're in my thoughts.”
― Paul Auster, Moon Palace

“Dismantling the architecture of my discontent”
― Paul Auster

“To feel estranged from language is to lose your own body.”
― Paul Auster, Selected Poems

“The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle.”
― Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

“It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.”
― Paul Auster, Moon Palace

“We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.”
― 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

“Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.”
― Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

“In the end, each life is no more than the
sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own
lack of purpose.”
― Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

“...once you fell in love with her, you
loved her until the day you died.”
― Paul Auster, Timbuktu

“Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.”
― 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

“But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a
story cannot dwell on what might have been.”
― 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

“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

“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

“As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.”
― Paul Auster, Auggie Wren's Christmas Story

“Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.”
― Paul Auster, The Locked Room

“El único acto íntimo entre dos extraños que todavía es posible, es el de la lectura”
― Paul Auster

“Just think it, and chances are it will happen.”
― Paul Auster, Man in the Dark

“Farts come from no
one and nowhere; they are anonymous emanations that belong
to the group as a whole, and even when every person in the
room can point to the culprit, the only sane course of action is
denial.”
― Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

“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

“As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.”
― Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies