4 3 2 1 Quotes

“the world as it was could never be more than a fraction of the world, for the real also consisted of what could have happened but didn’t, that one road was no better or worse than any other road, but the torment of being alive in a single body was that at any given moment you had to be on one road only, even though you could have been on another, traveling toward an altogether different place.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“I'm saying you'll never know if you made the wrong choice or not. You would need to have all the facts before you knew, and the only way to get all the facts is to be in two places at the same time--which is impossible.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“...and while all people were bound together by the common space they shared, their journeys through time were all different, which meant that each person lived in a slightly different world from everyone else.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“An unreal world was much bigger than a real world, and there was more than enough room in it to be yourself and not yourself at the same time.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“...feelings were always feelings, subjectively true one hundred percent of the time...”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“…but the truly frightening thing was to learn that his mother was no stronger than he was, that the blows of the world hurt her just as much as they hurt him and that except for the fact that she was older, there was no difference between them.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“In the long run, stories are probably no less valuable than money, but in the short run they have their decided limitations.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“The world wasn’t real anymore. Everything in it was a fraudulent copy of what it should have been, and everything that happened in it shouldn’t have been happening. For a long time afterward, Ferguson lived under the spell of this illusion, sleepwalking through his days and struggling to fall asleep at night, sick of a world he had stopped believing in, doubting everything that presented itself to his eyes.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“an exercise in the art of paying attention, and paying attention, Ferguson discovered, was the first step in learning how to be alive.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“Anything was possible, and just because things happened in one way didn't mean they couldn' t happen in another.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“The gods looked down from their mountain and shrugged.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“Everything solid for a time, and then the sun comes up one morning and the world begins to melt.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“I'm an intelligent pessimist, a pessimist who has occasional flashes of optimism. Nearly everything happens for the worst, but not always, you see, nothing is ever always, but i'm always expecting the worst, and when the worst doesn't happen, I get so excited I begin to sound like an optimist.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“The big event that rips through the heart of things and changes life for everyone, the unforgettable moment when something ends and something else begins. Was that what this was, he asked himself, a moment similar to the outbreak of war? No, not quite. War announces the beginning of a new reality, but nothing had begun today, a reality had ended, that was all, something had been subtracted from the world, and now there was a hole, a nothing where there had once been a something, as if every tree in the world had vanished, as if the very concept of tree or mountain had been erased from the human mind.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“The best thing about being fifteen is that you don’t have to be fifteen for more than a year.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“la lettura di Delitto e castigo lo cambiò, Delitto e castigo fu il fulmine che si abbatté dal cielo e lo mandò in frantumi, e quando riuscí a riprendersi Ferguson non ebbe piú dubbi sul futuro, se un libro poteva essere questo, se un romanzo poteva fare questo al tuo cuore, alla tua mente e ai tuoi sentimenti piú profondi sul mondo, allora scrivere romanzi era senz’altro la cosa migliore che potevi fare nella vita, perché Dostoevskij gli aveva insegnato che le storie inventate potevano andare ben oltre il semplice divertimento e lo svago, potevano rivoltarti come un calzino e scoperchiarti il cervello, potevano scottarti e gelarti e metterti completamente a nudo e scaraventarti tra i venti furiosi dell’universo e da quel giorno in poi, dopo aver annaspato per tutta l’infanzia, perso nei miasmi sempre piú fitti dello smarrimento, finalmente Ferguson capí dove stava andando, e negli anni successivi non tornò mai sulla sua decisione, nemmeno in quelli piú duri, quando gli sembrò quasi di cadere dai confini della terra. Aveva solo quindici anni, ma aveva già sposato un’idea, e il giovane Ferguson decise di onorarla, nella buona o nella cattiva sorte, in ricchezza o in povertà, in salute o in malattia, per tutta la vita.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“Normal. What did normal mean, Ferguson asked himself , and why wasn't it normal for him to feel the way he did about wanting to kiss and make love to other boys, the sex of one-sex was just as normal and natural as the sex of two-sex sex, maybe even more normal and more natural because a cock was something boys understood better than girls, and therefore it was easier to know what the other person wanted without having to guess, without having to play the courtship and seduction games that could make the sex of two-sex sex confounding, and why did a person have to choose between one or the other, why block out one-half of the humanity in the name of normal or natural when the truth was that everyone was Both, and people and society and the laws and religions of people in different societies were just too afraid to admit it.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“One of the odd things about being himself ... was that there seemed to be several of him, that he wasn't just one person but a collection of contradictory selves, and each time he was with a different person, he himself was different as well.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“He already understand that the world consisted of two realms, the visible and the invisible, and that the things he couldn't see were often more real than the things he could.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“because he was a man who had suffered but because he was a man who had suffered and could still crack jokes.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“There are only two choices, the main road and the back road, and each one has its good points and bad points. Say you choose the main road and get to your appointment on time. You won’t think about your choice, will you? And if you go by the back road and get there in time, again, no sweat, and you’ll never give it another thought for the rest of your life. But here’s where it gets interesting. You take the main road, there’s a three-car pileup, traffic is stalled for more than an hour, and as you sit there in your car, the only thing on your mind will be the back road and why you didn’t go that way instead. You’ll curse yourself for making the wrong choice, and yet how do you really know it was the wrong choice? Can you see the back road? Do you know what’s happening on the back road? Has anyone told you that an enormous redwood tree has fallen across the back road and crushed a passing car, killing the driver of that car and holding up traffic for three and a half hours? Has anyone looked at his watch and told you that if you had taken the back road it would have been your car that was crushed and you who were killed? Or else: No tree fell, and taking the main road was the wrong choice. Or else: You took the back road, and the tree fell on the driver just in front of you, and as you sit in your car wishing you had taken the main road, you know nothing about the three-car pileup that would have made you miss your appointment anyway. Or else: There was no three-car pileup, and taking the back road was the wrong choice.
What’s the point of all this, Archie?
I’m saying you’ll never know if you made the wrong choice or not. You would need to have all the facts before you knew, and the only way to get all the facts is to be in two places at the same time—which is impossible.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“Please, go ahead and improve society if you can, but meanwhile people are suffering, and I have a job to do.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“Anger and disappointment could take you just so far, he realized, but without curiosity you were lost.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“Time moved in two directions because every step into the future carried a memory of the past”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“The word psyche means two things in Greek, his aunt said. Two very different but interesting things. Butterfly and soul. But when you stop and think about it carefully, butterfly and soul aren’t so different, after all, are they? A butterfly starts out as a caterpillar, an ugly sort of earthbound, wormy nothing, and then one day the caterpillar builds a cocoon, and after a certain amount of time the cocoon opens and out comes the butterfly, the most beautiful creature in the world. That’s what happens to souls as well, Archie. They struggle in the depths of darkness and ignorance, they suffer through trials and misfortunes, and bit by bit they become purified by those sufferings, strengthened by the hard things that happen to them, and one day, if the soul in question is a worthy soul, it will break out of its cocoon and soar through the air like a magnificent butterfly.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“the big thing no one was expecting to happen, that no one had ever imagined could happen, was happening in all the unexpected and unimaginable ways that big things tend to happen.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“Such were the contradictions of manhood, Ferguson discovered. Your heart could be broken, but your gonads kept telling you to forget about your heart.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“That was the real difference, Ferguson concluded. Not too little money or too much money, not what a person did or failed to do, not buying a larger house or a more expensive car, but ambition. That explained why Brownstein and Solomon managed to float through their lives in relative peace—because they weren’t tormented by the curse of ambition.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“ambition meant never being satisfied, to be always hungering for something more, constantly pushing forward because no success could ever be big enough to quell the need for new and even bigger successes,”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“guns were a complicated business, and once you pointed a weapon at someone, especially someone with a weapon of his own, the thing you were counting on to protect you was just as likely to turn you into a corpse.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1