Leviathan Quotes

“Every time Sachs posed for a picture, he was forced to impersonate himself, to play the game of pretending to be who he was. After a while, it must have had an effect on him. (…) They say that a camera can rob a person of his soul. In this case, I believe it was just the opposite. With this camera, I believe that Sachs’s soul was gradually given back to him.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“Once you turn against yourself, it’s hard not to believe that everyone else is against you, too”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“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

“For the fact is that it takes a great deal of self-confidence for a person to poke fun at himself, and a person with that kind of self-confidence is rarely a fool or a bungler.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me, and even after I manage to get that word down on the page, it seems to sit there like a mirage, a speck of doubt glimmering in the sand.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“Everything is connected to everything else, every story overlaps with every other story.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“A book is a mysterious object," I said, "and once it floats out into the world, anything can happen. All kinds of mischief can be caused, and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it. For better or for worse, it’s completely out of your control.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“A book is a mysterious object, I said, and once it floats out into the world, anything can happen.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“In fifteen years, Sachs traveled from one end of himself to the other, and by the time he came to that last place, I doubt he even knew who he was anymore. So much distance had been covered by then, it wouldn't have been possible for him to remember where he had begun.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“Of all the interpretations I've considered over the years, this is the one I like best. That doesn't mean it's true, but as long as it could be true, it pleases me to think it is.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“I doubted that I would be able to sleep. There were too many things to digest, too many images churning in my mind, but the moment my head touched the pillow, I began to lose consciousness. I felt as if I'd been clubbed, as if my skull had been crushed by a stone. Some stories are too terrible, perhaps, and the only way to let them into you is to escape, to turn your back on them and steal off into the darkness.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“If it still shocks me to report what happened, that is because the real is always ahead of what we can imagine. No matter how wild we think our inventions might be, they can never match the unpredictability of what the real world continually spews forth. This lesson seems inescapable to me now. Anything can happen. And one way or another, it always does.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“İnsan bir kez kendine karşı olmaya başladı mı, başka herkesin de karşı olduğunu düşünür.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“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

“I learned that freedom can be dangerous. If you don’t watch out, it can kill you.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“When I met Maria at Sachs' apartment in 1979, she hadn't slept with a man in close to three years. It took her that long to recover from the shock of the beating, and abstinence was not a choice so much as a necessity, the only possible cure. As much as the physical humiliation she had suffered, the incident with Jerome had been a spiritual defeat. For the first time in her life, Maria had been chastened. She had stepped over the boundaries of herself, and the brutality of that experience had altered her sense of who she was. Until then, she had imagined herself capable of any thing: any adventure, any transgression, any dare. She had felt stronger than other people, immunized against the ravages and failures that afflict the rest of humanity. After the switch with Lilian, she learned how badly she had deceived herself. She was weak, she discovered, a person hemmed in by her own fears and inner constraints, as mortal and confused as anyone else.
It took her three years to repair the damage (to the extent that it was ever repaired), and when we crossed paths at Sachs's apartment that night, she was more or less ready to emerge from her shell.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“The boundaries of my world had shrunk, but I was still alive, and as long as I could go on breathing and farting and thinking my thoughts, what difference did it make where I was?”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“I can't remember everything we talked about, but the beginning of that conversation is a lot clearer to me than the end. By the time we came to the last half hour or forty-five minutes, there was so much bourbon in my system that I was actually seeing double. This had never happened to me before, and I had no idea how to bring the world back into focus. Whenever I looked at Sachs, there were two of him. Blinking my eyes didn't help, and shaking my head only made me dizzy. Sachs had turned into a man with two heads and two mouths, and when I finally stood up to leave, I can remember how he caught me in his four arms just as I was about to fall. It was probably a good thing that there were so many of him that afternoon. I was nearly a dead weight by then, and I doubt that one man could have carried me.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“And even if there was an end, it seemed doubtful that I would ever know about it — which meant that the story would go on and on, secreting its poison inside me forever.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“...and just then, in one of those unbidden flashes of insight, it occurred to him that nothing was meaningless, that everything in the world was connected to everything else.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“We were all growing old, and the only thing we could count on anymore was each other. (...) They were the people I loved, and it was their souls I carried around inside me.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“As the book progresses, it takes on a more and more unstable character — filled with unpredictable associations and departures, marked by increasingly rapid shifts in tone — until you reach a point where you feel the whole thing being to levitate, to rise ponderously off the ground like some gigantic weather balloon. By the last chapter, you've traveled so high up into the air, you realize that you can't come down again without falling, without being crushed.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“No one can say where a book comes from, least of all the person who writes it. Books are born out of ignorance, and if they go on living after they are written, it's only to the degree that they cannot be understood.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“At any given moment, four or five separate dialogues were going on across the table, but because people weren't necessarily talking to the person next to them, these dialogues kept intersecting with one another, causing abrupt shifts in the pairings of the speakers, so that everyone seemed to be taking part in all the conversations at the same time, simultaneously chattering away about his or her own life and eavesdropping on everyone else as well. Add to this the frequent interruptions from the children, the coming and goings of the different courses, the pouring of wine, the dropped plates, overturned glasses, and spilled condiments, the dinner began to resemble an elaborate, hastily improvised vaudeville routine.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“I can't remember everything we talked about, but the beginning of that conversation is a lot clearer to me than the end. By the time we came to the last half hour or forty-five minutes, there was so much bourbon in my system that I was actually seeing double. This had never happened to me before, and I had no idea how to bring the world back into focus.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“A könyveket a tudatlanság szüli, és ha megírásuk után tovább élnek, csak olyan mértékben, amennyire nem lehet őket megérteni.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin. There were no witnesses, but it appears that he was sitting on the grass next to his parked car when the bomb he was building accidentally went off.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“Si hay muchos americanos que están orgullosos de su bandera, hay otros tantos que se sienten avergonzados de ella, y por cada persona que la considera un objeto sagrado, hay otra que querría escupirle, o quemarla, o arrastrarla por el fango. La Estatua de la Libertad es inmune a estos conflictos.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan

“a book is a mysterious object, i said, and once it floats out into the world, anything can happen. all kind of mischief can be caused, and there's not a damned thing you can do about it. for better or worse, it's completely out of control.”
― Paul Auster, Leviathan