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cdecb3a
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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.
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reading
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Paul Auster |
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ce70012
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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.
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Paul Auster |
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3a522af
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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.
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Paul Auster |
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3957141
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You're too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.
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world
margot
trippy
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Paul Auster |
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5c911d3
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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.
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writing
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Paul Auster |
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4abbea5
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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 wer..
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Paul Auster |
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18455b5
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One should never underestimate the power of books.
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Paul Auster |
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33a9797
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All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.
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Paul Auster |
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3bbf324
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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..
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scotland
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Paul Auster |
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8787eb4
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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.
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Paul Auster |
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ecc7373
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We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.
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miracle
persuade
impossible
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Paul Auster |
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56fc4f8
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You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.
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Paul Auster |
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a13fc06
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The truth of the story lies in the details.
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story
truth
tension
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Paul Auster |
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d9c59e7
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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 fe..
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Paul Auster |
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0ce0fd0
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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 fe..
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inspirational
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Paul Auster |
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f31bdb3
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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.
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Paul Auster |
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f715dd1
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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.
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metafiction
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Paul Auster |
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98242f1
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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 sen..
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self-determination
freedom
life
philosophy
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Paul Auster |
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c3e356e
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and now we get to the hard part. the endings, the farewells, and the famous last words. if you don't hear from me often, remember that you're in my thoughts.
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paul-auster
moon-palace
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Paul Auster |
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b6f9b9d
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The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle.
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Paul Auster |
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9981963
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But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.
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Paul Auster |
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ef28f40
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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.
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Paul Auster |
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21ed12f
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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.
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Paul Auster |
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a63697e
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We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.
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Paul Auster |
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644f918
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You can't see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether strangers or friends or the most intimate beloveds, your own face is invisible to you. You can see other parts of yourself, arms and legs, hands and feet, shoulders and torso, but only from the front, nothing of the back except the backs of your legs if you twist them into th..
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self-reflection
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Paul Auster |
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7168b28
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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.
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Paul Auster |
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b176cd7
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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.
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Paul Auster |
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1cc68eb
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Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man's solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude
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Paul Auster |
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dccd0f2
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Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time.
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Paul Auster |
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d884922
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Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you musn't waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.
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Paul Auster |
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5b757ec
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Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else.
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Paul Auster |
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6b82857
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We find ourselves only by looking to what we're not.
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looking
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Paul Auster |
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0977468
|
It was. It will never be again. Remember.
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paul-auster
quotes
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Paul Auster |
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84ee7a4
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Impossible, I realize, to enter another's solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is intractable, here all is hermetic an..
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Paul Auster |
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1a6c07d
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Escaping into a film is not like escaping into a book. Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination, where as you can watch a film-and even enjoy it-in a state of mindless passivity.
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Paul Auster |
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9fbe447
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I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.
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Paul Auster |
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cbd564e
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Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.
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Paul Auster |
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f5e5709
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you can survive only if nothing is necessary to you
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Paul Auster |
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0e7c9aa
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I've been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it's too late, but I see now how badly I've deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, ..
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writing
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Paul Auster |
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99c0578
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To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.
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Paul auster |
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6d62e74
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Thoughts are real', he said. 'Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future'.
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Paul Auster |
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59568cf
|
The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.
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Paul Auster |
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a3d4d3d
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Bodies count, of course - they count more than we're willing to admit - but we don't fall in love with bodies, we fall in love with each other. We all know that, but the moment we go beyond a catalogue of surface qualities and appearances, words begin to fail us, to crumble apart in mystical confusions and cloudy, unsubstantial metaphors.
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Paul Auster |
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cba29b9
|
I was perfectly calm and perfectly insane, perfectly prepared to accept what the moment had offered. Indifference of that magnitude is rare and because it can be achieved only by someone ready to let go of who he is, it demands respect. It inspires awe in those who gaze upon it.
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nothing-to-lose
insanity
fearlessness
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Paul Auster |