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9cbdc01
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n`m , hnk 'shy kthyr@ 'sh`r blkhjl mnh . 'Hynan l tbdw ly Hyty 'kthr mn slsl@ mn lndmt , wln`Tft lkhTy'@ , wl'khT lty l utGtfr . hdhh hy
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Paul Auster |
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b5e9a05
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Yes, she is in love with him, and yes, in spite of his qualms and inner hesitations, he loves her back, however improbable that might seem to him. Note here for the record that he is not someone with a special fixation on young girls. Until now, all the women in his life have been more or less his own age. Pilar therefore does not represent an embodiment of some ideal female type for him--she is merely herself, a small piece of luck he stum..
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Paul Auster |
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adcacb8
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If your only motive is to be loved, to ingratiate yourself with the crowd, you're bound to fall into bad habits, and eventually the public will grow tired of you. You have to keep testing yourself, pushing yourself as hard as you can. You do it for yourself, but in the end it's this struggle to do better that endears you to your fans.
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Paul Auster |
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962af2e
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Writing begins in the body, it is the music of the body, and even if the words have meaning, can sometimes have meaning, the music of the words is where the meanings begin....Writing as a lesser form of dance.
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Paul Auster |
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e7595c3
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The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn't really anyone, and I wasn't really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a dead man's book.
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Paul Auster |
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b9525d9
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A here exists only in relation to a there, not the other way around. There's this only because there's that; if we don't look up, we'll never know what's down. Think of it, boy. We find ourselves only by looking what we're not. You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.
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Paul Auster |
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5abe971
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But suddenly, after all this time, I feel there is something to say, and if I don't quickly write it down, my head will burst. It doesn't matter if you read it. It doesn't even matter if I send it - assuming that could be done. Perhaps it comes down to this. I am writing to you because you know nothing. Because you are far away from me and know nothing.
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Paul Auster |
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aedcec1
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He knew that his wings could ignite at any moment, but the closer he came to touching the fire, the more he sensed that he was fulfilling his destiny. As he put it in his journal that night: If I mean to save my life, then I have to come within an inch of destroying it.
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Paul Auster |
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c042873
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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 Soph..
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Paul Auster |
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c46b488
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Good begets good; evil begets evil; and even if the good you give is met by evil, you have no choice but to go on giving better than you get. Otherwise-and these were Willy's exact words-why bother to go on living?
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Paul Auster |
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2fdb4a0
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Existence was bigger than just life. It was everyone's life all together, and even if you lived in Buffalo, New York and had never been more than ten miles from home, you were part of the puzzle, too. It didn't matter how small your life was.
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Paul Auster |
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23c63e5
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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.
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life
parents
parents-and-children
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Paul Auster |
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fecfa83
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an exercise in the art of paying attention, and paying attention, Ferguson discovered, was the first step in learning how to be alive.
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Paul Auster |
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dd3e64f
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They had come to the end of what they could talk about. Beyond that point there was nothing: the random thoughts of men who knew nothing.
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Paul Auster |
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dc16a06
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If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics
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Paul Auster |
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013e446
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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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bdbd31d
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nHn dy'man mwjwdwn fy lnhy@ , dy'man nqf `l~ Hf@ llHZ@ l'khyr@ , wlmdh ynbGy 'n ntwq` 'n nkwn mkhtlfyn lan ?
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Paul Auster |
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cab1149
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SHyH 'n bTn qdmyk mthbWt `l~ l'rD, lkn kl m tbq~ mnk m`rWD llhw
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Paul Auster |
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87ed32d
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There is no escape from this. Either you do or you don't. And if you do, you can't be sure of doing it the next time. And if you don't, you never will again.
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Paul Auster |
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f9bd6ad
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Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one's private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history - which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, therefore, is present in his mind at once, as if each element were reflecting the light of all the others, and at the same time emitting its own unique and unquenchable radiance.
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memory
past
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Paul Auster |
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d611860
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Speak now before it is too late, and then hope to go on speaking until there is nothing more to be said.
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Paul Auster |
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f0b1957
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But the present is no less dark than the past, and its mystery is equal to anything the future might hold. Such is the way of the world: one step at a time, one word and then the next.
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Paul Auster |
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c8de7f2
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No, she can weather his disappointments if she has to, that isn't the problem, she can put up with anything as long as she feels he is solidly with her, but that is precisely what she doesn't feel anymore, and even if he seems content to glide along with her out of old habits, the reflex of old affections, she is becoming ever more certain, no, is probably too strong a word for it, she is becoming ever more willing to entertain the idea t..
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paul auster |
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205e79e
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l~ lrGm mm qd tftrD, fnaW lHqy'q l ymkn `ksh. wmjrWd kwnka qdr `l~ ldkhwl, l y`ny 'naW fy stT`tk 'n tkhrj. flmdkhl l ttHwl l~ mkhrj, wl shy yDmn 'n ybq~ lbb ldhy jtzth qbl brh@ fy mknh `ndm tstdyr ltbHth `nh mn jdyd.
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Paul Auster |
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a8ada7f
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All children are love children, he said, but only the best ones are ever called that.
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children
love
moon
palace
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Paul Auster |
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9a817f5
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Life got in the way -- two years in the army, work, marriage, family responsibilities, the need to earn more and more money, all the muck that bogs us down when we don't have the balls to stand up for ourselves -- but I had never lost my interest in books.
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Paul Auster |
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dc68559
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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 anythi..
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Paul Auster |
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108a0af
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When every card in the deck is stacked against you, the only way to win a hand is to break the rules. You beg, borrow, and steal, as the old adage goes, and if you happen to get caught in the act, at least you've gone down fighting the good fight.
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Paul Auster |
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9e1824e
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Would it not be better to learn the truth once and for all instead of living in a state of perpetual uncertainty?
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Paul Auster |
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155b9c6
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In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for.
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Paul Auster |
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c285288
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In the long run, stories are probably no less valuable than money, but in the short run they have their decided limitations.
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Paul Auster |
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3d87281
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We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. 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..
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Paul Auster |
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26a3bd5
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To feel estranged from language is to lose your own body.
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Paul Auster |
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384a1f0
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But that was the beauty of this particular game. The moment you lost, you won.
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Paul Auster |
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48ef673
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rjl yjd lHy@ qbl@ ll`ysh `l~ "sTH" nfsh, mn lTby`y jdan 'n yktfy bZhr "sTHh" llakhryn."
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Paul Auster |
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efc0c44
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that each ejaculation contains several billion sperm cells -or roughly the same number as there are people in the world- which means that, in himself, each man holds the potential of an entire world. And what would happen, could it happen, is the full range of possibilities: a spawn of idiots and geniuses, of the beautiful and the deformed, of saints, catatonics, thieves, stock brokers, and high-wire artists. Each man, therefore, is the ent..
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Paul Auster |
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018abbe
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To think one thought meant thinking the opposite thought, and no sooner did that second thought destroy the first thought than a third thought rose up to destroy the second.
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Paul Auster |
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7c272ae
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Ht~ lwqy'` qd l tqwl lHqyq@ dy'man.
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Paul Auster |
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c743b2d
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He is twenty-eight years old, and to the best of his knowledge he has no ambitions. No burning ambitions, in any case, no clear idea of what building a plausible future might entail for him.
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Paul Auster |
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368b048
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Yo habia saltado desde el borde del acantilado y justo cuando estaba a punto de dar contra el fondo, ocurrio un hecho extraordinario: me entere que habia gente que me queria. Que le quieran a uno de ese modo lo cambia todo. No disminuye el terror de la caida, pero te da una nueva perspectiva de lo que significa ese terror. Yo habia saltado desde el borde y entonces, en el ultimo instante, algo me cogio en el aire. Ese algo es lo que defino ..
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Paul Auster |
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d307fa4
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Words tend to last a big longer than things, but eventually they fade too, along with the pictures they once evoked. Entire categories of objects disappear - flowerpots, for example, or cigarette filters, or rubber bands - and for a time you will be able to recognize those words, even if you cannot recall what they mean. But then, little by little, the words become only sounds, a random collection of glottals and fricatives, a storm of whir..
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Paul Auster |
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8ba97d3
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Once a man begins to recognize himself in another, he can no longer look on that person as a stranger.
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Paul Auster |
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2c35799
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What people saw when he appeared before them, then, was not really him, but a person he had invented, an artificial creature he could manipulate in order to manipulate others. He himself remained invisible, a puppeteer working the strings of his alter-ego from a dark, solitary place behind the curtain
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Paul Auster |
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5ca9638
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Better to wait quietly in their corner, they think, than to be dashed against the stones.
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Paul Auster |