The Locked Room Quotes

“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

“Words were no longer simply words, but a curious codes of silence, a way of speaking that continually moved around the thing that was being said. As long as we avoided the real subject, the spell would not broken. We both slipped naturally into this kind of banter, and it became all the more powerful because neither of us abandoned the character. We knew what we were doing, but at the same time we pretended not to. Thus my courtship of Sophie began - slowly, decorously, building by the smallest of increments.”
― Paul Auster, The Locked Room

“No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.”
― Paul Auster, The Locked Room

“Everything had changed for me, and words that I had never understood before suddenly began to make sense. This came as revelation, and when I finally had time to absorb it, I wondered how I had managed to live so long without learning this simple thing. I am not talking about desire so much as knowledge, the discovery that two people, through desire, can create a thing more powerful than either of them can create alone.”
― Paul Auster, The Locked Room

“My true place in the world, it turned out, was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and not-self, and for the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact center of the world.”
― Paul Auster, The Locked Room

“Deseaba llamar a Sophie. Un día incluso fui hasta la oficina de correos y esperé en la cola de las llamadas al extranjero pero no llegué a llamarla. Ahora las palabras me fallaban constantemente y me entró pánico ante la idea de derrumbarme en el teléfono. ¿Qué podía decirle, después de todo? En lugar de eso, le mandé una postal de Laurel y Hardy. En la parte de atrás escribí: "Los verdadero matrimonios nunca tienen sentido. Mira la pareja del dorso. Prueba que cualquier cosa es posible, ¿no? Quizá deberíamos empezar a ponernos sombreros hongo. Por lo menos, acuérdate de vaciar el armario antes de que yo vuelva. Abrazos a Ben”
― Paul Auster, The Locked Room

“Nessuno può sconfinare in un altro - per il semplice motivo che nessuno può accedere a se stesso.”
― Paul Auster, The Locked Room

“Una volta tanto mi lasciai andare, senza volermi sentire superiore alla mia felicità, senza volermi guardare dall'alto o essere più intelligente dei miei sentimenti.”
― Paul Auster, The Locked Room

“Non parlo tanto del desiderio, quanto della consapevolezza, della scoperta che due persone, tramite il desiderio, possono creare una realtà più potente di quella che ciascuna potrebbe creare da sola.”
― Paul Auster, The Locked Room

“The book was a work of fiction. Even though it was based on facts, it could tell nothing but lies. I signed the contract, and afterwards I felt like a man who had signed away his soul.”
― Paul Auster, The Locked Room

“I was in good form that night. Sophie inspired me, and it didn’t take long for me to get warmed up. I cracked jokes, told stories, performed little tricks with the silverware. The woman was so beautiful that I had trouble keeping my eyes off her. I wanted to see her laugh, to see how her face would respond to what I said, to watch her eyes, to study her gestures. God knows what absurdities I came out with, but I did my best to detach myself, to bury my real motives under this onslaught of charm. That was the hard part. I knew that Sophie was lonely, that she wanted the comfort of a warm body beside her—but a quick roll in the hay was not what I was after, and if I moved too fast that was probably all it would turn out to be. At this early stage, Fanshawe was still there with us, the unspoken link, the invisible force that had brought us together. It would take some time before he disappeared, and until that happened, I found myself willing to wait.”
― Paul Auster, The Locked Room

“No matter how remarkable his behavior was, you always felt that he was detached from it. More than anything else, it was this quality that sometimes scared me away from him. I would get so close to Fanshawe, would admire him so intensely, would want so desperately to measure up to him—and then, suddenly, a moment would come when I realized that he was alien to me, that the way he lived inside himself could never correspond to the way I needed to live. I wanted too much of things, I had too many desires, I lived too fully in the grip of the immediate ever to attain such indifference. It mattered to me that I do well, that I impress people with the empty signs of my ambition: good grades, varsity letters, awards for whatever it was they were judging us on that week. Fanshawe remained aloof from all that, quietly standing in his corner, paying no attention. If he did well, it was always in spite of himself, with no struggle, no effort, no stake in the thing he had done. This posture could be unnerving, and it took me a long time to learn that what was good for Fanshawe was not necessarily good for me.”
― Paul Auster, The Locked Room

“As long as we avoided the real subject, the spell could not be broken. We both slipped naturally into this kind of banter, and it became all the more powerful because neither of us abandoned the charade. We knew what we were doing, but at the same time we pretended not to.”
― Paul Auster, The Locked Room

“Amar las palabras, tener interés en lo que se escribe, creer en el poder de los libros, esto supera a todo lo demás, y a su lado la vida de uno se queda muy pequeña.”
― Paul Auster, The Locked Room

“Bir ölüm fermanı çıkarmak zaten yeterince kötüydü, ama ölmüş bir adam için çalışmak en az onun kadar kötüydü.”
― Paul Auster, The Locked Room