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35cd971
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T]he only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of.
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literature
reading
passion
bookworm
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Paul Auster |
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f674177
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For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms "success" and "failure" had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one's place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the ..
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Paul Auster |
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9517db2
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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.
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Paul Auster |
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aac4362
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Every man is the author of his own life.
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life
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Paul Auster |
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3bc0264
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What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes.
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Paul Auster |
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e6e4a3a
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It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.
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Paul Auster |
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8309a9f
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Just think it, and chances are it will happen.
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Paul Auster |
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2a600cd
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It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.
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Paul Auster |
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e91cdba
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Wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man.
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Paul Auster |
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90390e5
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Just because you wander in the desert, it does not mean there is a promised land.
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Paul Auster |
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98802bd
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We are left with nothing but death, the irreducible fact of our own mortality. Death after a long illness we can accept with resignation. Even accidental death we can ascribe to fate. But for a man to die of no apparent cause, for a man to die simply because he is a man, brings us so close to the invisible boundary between life and death that we no longer know which side we are on. Life becomes death, and it is as if this death has owned th..
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Paul Auster |
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29c5589
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Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out.
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Paul Auster |
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949908e
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it's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes--all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom
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Paul Auster |
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1c52e65
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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.
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Paul Auster |
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5346610
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If you look into someone's face long enough, eventually you're going to feel that you're looking at yourself.
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Paul Auster |
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685263d
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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. Wal..
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Paul Auster |
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b805011
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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.
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Paul Auster |
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a3d67e1
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Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.
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Paul Auster |
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b58ac10
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It was never possible for him to be where he was. For as long as he lived, he was somewhere else, between here and there. But never really here. And never really there.
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Paul Auster |
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fcb5137
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l ywjd m hw 'fZ` mn mwjh@ mt`lqt rjl myt. lh Hy@ wm`n~ bHyth, w`ndm tnthy Hy@ lnsn ttGyr Tby`@ 'shyh ll'bd.
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Paul Auster |
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96ebef7
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lns ytmsWkwn bl`tqd b'nh mhm knt l'shy fy lmDy syy'@, fnh 'fDl mn l'shy lan. wm knt `lyh qbl ywmyn hw 'fDl mm knt `lyh Ht~ fy l'ms lqryb. wklm 'wGltu fy lmDy, yuSbH l`lm 'jml wmrGwban 'kthr
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Paul Auster |
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3ddb0b1
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I learned that books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author.
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Paul Auster |
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0670892
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Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.
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Paul Auster |
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da1108a
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I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book. It was like living in a padded cell, but of all the lives I could have lived at that moment, it was the only one that made sense to me. I wasn't capable of being in the world, and I knew that if I tried to go back into it before I was ready, I would be crushed.
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writing-process
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Paul Auster |
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6c3b7ba
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At that point, Noriko finally breaks down and begins to cry sobbing into her hands as the floodgates open - this young woman who has suffered in silence for so long, this good woman who refuse to believe she's good, for only the good doubt their own goodness, which is what makes them good in the first place. The bad know they are good, but the good know nothing. They spend their lives forgiving others, but they can't forgive themselves.
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Paul Auster |
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1bf0e33
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Here I am of the air, a beautiful thing for the light to shine on. Perhaps you will remember that. I am...
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peter-stillman
city-of-glass
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Paul Auster |
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90f3e8d
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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.
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Paul Auster |
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2bf9661
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once you fell in love with her, you loved her until the day you died.
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Paul Auster |
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0090ed7
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But I know nothing of time. I am new every day. I am born when I wake up in the morning, I grow old during the day, and I die at night when I go to sleep. It is not my fault. And I am doing so well today. I am doing so much better than I have ever done before.
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Paul Auster |
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79d71e3
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And if Amsterdam was hell, and if hell was a memory, then he realized that perhaps there was some purpose to his being lost. Cut off from everything that was familiar to him, unable to discover even a single point of reference, he saw that his steps, by taking him nowhere, were taking him him nowhere but into himself. He was wandering inside himself, and he was lost. Far from troubling him, this state of being lost because a source of happi..
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lost
memory
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Paul Auster |
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59fc9f3
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I tend to think that everything counts. 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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a880802
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As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.
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Paul Auster |
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46a7c84
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You're a dreamer, boy," he said. "Your mind is on the moon, and from the looks of things, it's never going to be anywhere else. You have no ambitions, you don't give a damn about money, and you're too much of a philosopher to have any feeling for art. What am I going to do with you? You need someone to look after you, to make sure you have food in your belly and a bit of cash in your pocket. Once I'm gone, you'll be right back where you sta..
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life
moon
dreamer
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Paul Auster |
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89e6ed6
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Not to me," I said. Kafka wrote his first story in one night. Stendhal wrote The Charterhouse of Parma in forty-nine days. Melville wrote Moby- Dick in sixteen months. Flaubert spent five years on Madame Bovary. Musil worked for eighteen years on The Man Without Qualities and died before he could finish. Do we care about any of that now?"
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Paul Auster |
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f575669
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There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. [...] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself.
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Paul Auster |
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0e446ca
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The room was a machine that measured my condition: how much of me remained, how much of me was no longer there. I was both perpetrator and witness, both actor and audience in a theater of one. I could follow the progress of my own dismemberment. Piece by piece, I could watch myself dissapear.
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Paul Auster |
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7d9eef8
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Farts come from no one and nowhere; they are anonymous emanations that belong to the group as a whole, and even when every person in the room can point to the culprit, the only sane course of action is denial.
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Paul Auster |
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0067ac9
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I became hypnotized by my own loneliness, unwilling to stop until my eyes wouldn't stay open anymore, watching the white line of the highway as though it was the last thing that connected me to the earth.
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Paul Auster |
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d8d122a
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For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than his surface to others. There are few demands to be met, and no commitment is required. Marriage, on the other hand, closes the door. Your existence is confined to a narrow space in which you are constantly forced to reveal yourself - and therefore, constantly obliged to look into yourself, to examine your ow..
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Paul Auster |
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6752750
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Real love...is when you get as much pleasure from giving pleasure as you do from receiving it.
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Paul Auster |
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c21b3e3
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That's how it is with want. As long as you lack something you yearn for it without cease. if only I could have that one thing, you tell yourself, all my problems would be solved. But once you get it, once the object of your desires is thrust into your hands, it begins to lose its charm. Other wants assert themselves, other desires make themselves felt, and bit by bit you discover that you're right back where you started.
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Paul Auster |
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80f5508
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And then one day the walls of your house finally collapse. If the door is still standing, however, all you have to do is walk through it,and you are back inside. It's pleasant sleeping out under the stars. Never mind the rain. It can't last very long.
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Paul Auster |
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8e8287f
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One day there is life . . . and then, suddenly, it happens there is death
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Paul Auster |
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f5e768a
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ttshkl fy l`ql mnTq mZlm@ , wdh lm tbdhl ,jhdan mtwSlan lstd` l'shy lty khtft, fsr`n m stDy` blnsb@ lyk l~ l'bd
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Paul Auster |