Invisible Quotes

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

“You both love Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Hawthorne and Melville, Flaubert and Stendahl, but at that stage of your life you cannot stomach Henry James, while Gwyn argues that he is the giant of giants, the colossus who makes all other novelists look like pygmies. You are in complete harmony about the greatness of Kafka and Beckett, but when you tell her that Celine belongs in their company, she laughs at you and calls him a fascist maniac. Wallace Stevens yes, but next in line for you is William Carlos Williams, not T.S. Eliot, whose work Gwyn can recite from memory. You defend Keaton, she defends Chaplin, and while you both howl at the sight of the Marx Brothers, your much-adored W.C. Fields cannot coax a single smile from her. Truffaut at his best touches you both, but Gwyn finds Godard pretentious and you don't, and while she lauds Bergman and Antonioni as twin masters of the universe, you reluctantly tell her that you are bored by their films. No conflicts about classical music, with J.S. Bach at the top of the list, but you are becoming increasingly interested in jazz, while Gwyn still clings to the frenzy of rock and roll, which has stopped saying much of anything to you. She likes to dance, and you don't. She laughs more than you do and smokes less. She is a freer, happier person than you are, and whenever you are with her, the world seems brighter and more welcoming, a place where your sullen, introverted self can almost begin to feel at home.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“Real love...is when you get as much pleasure from giving pleasure as you do from receiving it.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“He wonders if words aren't an essential element of sex, if talking isn't finally a more subtle form of touching, and if the images dancing in our heads aren't just as important as the bodies we hold in our arms. Margot tells him that sex is the one thing in life that counts for her, that if she couldn't have sex she would probably kill herself to escape the boredom and monotony of being trapped inside her own skin. Walker doesn't say anything, but as he comes into her for the second time, he realizes that he shares her opinion. He is mad for sex. Even in the grip of the most crushing despair, he is mad for sex. Sex is the lord and the redeemer, the only salvation on earth.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“This is the kind of room poets are supposed to work in, the kind of room that threatens to break your spirit and forces you into constant battle with yourself.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“Pity is such an awful, useless emotion- you have to bottle it up and keep it to yourself.The moment you try to express it, it only makes things worse.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“But if these unavoidable separations cause you a measure of pain, they also increase your longing for her, and perhaps that isn’t a bad thing, you decide, for you spend your days in the thrall of breathless anticipation, agitated and alert, counting the hours until you can see her and hold her again. Intense. That is the word you use to describe yourself now. You are intense. Your feelings are intense. Your life has become increasingly intense.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“So weak, so little left, time running out. I will be robbed of my old age. I try not to feel bitter about it, but sometimes I can't help myself. Life is shit, I know, but the only thing I want is more life, more years on this godforsaken earth.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“You understood that there was no better thing in the world than to be kissed in the way she was kissing you, that this was without argument the single most important justification for being alive.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“Half the people I know want to be writers.

Why do you say want? If you’re already doing it, then it’s not about the future. It already exists in the present.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“Se pregunta si las palabras no serán un elemento esencial de la sexualidad, si hablar no es en definitiva una forma más sutil de acariciar, y si las imágenes que bailan en nuestra cabeza no son igual de importantes que los cuerpos que abrazamos.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“...cannot possibly know who you are, you imagine that she is suspicious of all young people-as a matter of principle- and therefore what she sees when she looks at you is not you as yourself but you as yet one more querrilla fighter in the war against authority, an unruly insurrectionist who has no business barging into the sanctum of her library and asking for work. Such are the times you live in,the times you both live in. She instructs you to put the cards in order, and you can sense how deeply she wants you to fail, how happy it will make her to reject your application, and because you want the job just as much as she doesn't want you to have it, you make sure that you don't fail.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“Now that you are living on such intimate terms with her, Gwyn has emerged as a slightly different person... She is both funnier and more salacious than you imagined, more vulgar and idiosyncratic, more passionate, more playful, and you are startled to realize how deeply she exults in filthy language and the bizarre slang of sex... Common twentieth-century words do not interest her. She shuns the term making love, for example, in favor of older, more hilarious locutions, such as rumpty-rumpty, quaffing, and bonker bang. A good orgasm is referred to as a bone-shaker. Her ass is a rumdadum. Her crotch is a slittie, a quim, a quim-box, a quimsby. Her breasts are boobs and tits, boobies and titties, her twin girls. At one time or another, your penis is a bong, a blade, a slurp, a shaft, a drill, a quencher, a lancelot, a lightning rod, Charles Dickens, Dick Driver, and Adam Junior... In the grip of approaching orgasm, however, she tends to revert to the contemporary standbys, falling back on the simplest, crudest words in the English lexicon to express her feelings. Cunt, pussy, fuck. Fuck me, Adam. Again and again. Fuck me, Adam. For an entire month you are the captive of that word, the willing prisoner of that word, the embodiment of that word. You dwell in the land of flesh, and your cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow you all the days of your life.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“...isn’t it intriguing that thought cannot exist without language, and since language is a function of the brain, we would have to say that language---the ability to experience the world through symbols---is in some sense a physical property of human beings, which proves that the old mind-body duality is so much nonsense, doesn’t it? Adieu, Descartes. The mind and body are one.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“تو برای این دنیا زیادی خوب هستی، و به همین خاطر دنیا عاقبت تو را خرد خواهد کرد.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“گمان می‌کنم شرم بهتر از غرور است، بهتر است باظرافت به سایرین نزدیک بشوی تا این‌که باکمال و بی‌نقصی تحمل‌ناپذیرت همه را مرعوب کنی.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“Dread has become fact. Innocence has turned into guilt, and hope is a word that rhymes with despair.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“Put something in the wrong place, and even though it is still there—quite possibly smack under your nose—it can vanish for the rest of time.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“From poetry to justice, then. Poetic justice, if you will. For the sad fact remains: there is far more poetry in the world than justice.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“Find yourself drowning in a sea of trouble, and hard work can become the raft that ends up keeping you afloat.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“More often than not, what stirs the imagination is best kept in the imagination, and Gwyn is aware of that, she is wise enough to know that the distance between thought and deed can be enormous, a gulf as large as the world itself.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“بااین‌حال اعتراف می‌کنم که هر بار به یاد او می‌افتم، غمی ناگهانی احساس می‌کنم. او موجودی ناممکن بود، موجود دست نیافتی، کسی که هرگز آنجا نبود، شبحی از سرزمین شایدها.”
― Paul Auster, Invisible

“Back”
― Paul Auster, Invisible