Quotes from Paul Auster

The sky is white. It smells of the earth, and it is not there. The sky is white like the earth, and it smells of yesterday. All this was tomorrow. All this was a hundred years from now.

Such were the contradictions of manhood, Ferguson discovered. Your heart could be broken, but your gonads kept telling you to forget about your heart.

Perhaps when we shrink down to almost nothing, we will at last find one another. Life is, after all, very difficult. Most of us die here simply because we forget to breathe.

He learned how to look at himself from a distance, to see himself first of all as a man among other men, then as a collection of random particles of matter, and finally as a single speck of dust—and the farther he traveled from his point of origin, she said, the closer he came to achieving greatness.

Et ce monde étrange continue de tourner.

I'm not going to apologize for things that need no apology.

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.

One must die lovable (if one can). You are moved by this sentence, especially by the words in parentheses, which demonstrate a rare sensitivity of spirit, you feel, a hard-won understanding of how difficult it is to be lovable, especially for someone who is old, who is sinking into decrepitude and must be cared for by others. If one can. There is probably no greater human achievement than to be lovable at the end,

I have come to New York because it is the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal. You have only to open your eyes to see it. The broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts. The whole city is a junk heap.

What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook?

what at first had seemed to be no more than a small bump in the road was turned into a full-scale misfortune

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.

Aus den fernsten Weiten des Weltraums betrachtet, ist die Erde nicht größer als ein Staubkorn. Bedenke das, wenn du das nächste Mal das Wort "Menschheit" schreibst.

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.

Öyküler ancak onlar? anlatabilecek olanlar?n ba??ndan geçer demi?ti biri bir gün: Ayn? ?ekilde belki ya?ant?lar da onlar? ya?ayabilecek olanlara sunarlar kendilerini.

una vida rota por el exceso y la escasez de este mundo

Please, go ahead and improve society if you can, but meanwhile people are suffering, and I have a job to do.

There it was: a full confession. Sherlock Holmes had done it again, and as I marveled at my devastating powers of deduction, I wished there had been two of me so I could have patted myself on the back. I know it sounds arrogant, but how often does one achieve a mental triumph of that magnitude? After listening to her speak just two words, I had nailed the whole bloody thing. If Watson had been there, he would have been shaking his head and muttering under his breath.

Something was wrong, and while Mr. Bones could scarcely imagine what that thing was, Henry's sadness was beginning to have an effect on him, and within a matter of minutes he had taken on the boy's sadness as his own. Such is the was with dogs.

She seemed perfect to you, and even during her first attack of vertigo, which you happened to witness when you were six (the two of you climbing up the inner staircase of the Statue of Liberty), you were not alarmed, because she was a good and conscientious mother, and she managed to hide her fear from you by turning the descent into a game: sitting on the stairs together and going down one step at a time, asses on the rungs, laughing all the way to the bottom.

But fierce as my attraction was, I also knew that it was more than just a physical attraction [...], more than just a momentenry surge of animal desire. I understood that she wasn't a terribly articulate person and nothing she said that afternoon was particularly brilliant or memorable. And yet there I was in a state of maximum torment - burning and longing and pining, a man trapped in the spines of love.

If there is nothing, then, but silence, is it not presumptuous of me to speak? And yet, if there had been anything more than silence, would I have felt the need to speak in the first place?

So it goes as I work my way down the page, and each cluster of marks is a word, and each word is a sound in my head, and each time I write another word, I hear the sound of my own voice, even though my lips are silent.

she'd seen the spark in his fledgling soul, and no one can ever amount to anything in this life without someone else to believe in him.