Quotes from Paul Auster

Behind all the surface composure, there seemed to be a great darkness: an urge to test himself, to take risks, to haunt the edges of things.

cuando una persona es lo bastante afortunada para vivir dentro de una historia, para habitar un mundo imaginario, las penas de este mundo desaparecen. Mientras la historia sigue su curso, la realidad deja de existir.

A meal was no more than a fragile defense against the inevitability of the next meal. Food itself could never answer the question of food; it only delayed the moment when the question would have to be asked in earnest.

I know you don't love me but that doesn't mean I'm the wrong girl for you.

No debes poner todos tus huevos en la misma cesta. A la inversa, no debes contar los huevos antes de que estén puestos.

No?i koje je tamo proveo bile su gotovo nepodnošljive, pa kakav je to dobar dom ako se u njemu ne osje?aš sigurnim, ako se, upravo na mjestu koje smatraš pribježištem, prema tebi odnose kao prema nekom izop?eniku? Nije pravo zatvoriti dušu u mra?nu kutiju. To ?ine nakon smrti, ali dok si živ, sve dok u sebi imaš i onaj zadnji atom snage, dužan si samome sebi i svemu svetom na ovome svijetu ne pristati na takvo poniženje.

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 this surface to others.

Afterwards, walking to the car with my father, he told me I had played a nice game. No I hadn't, I said, it was terrible. Well, you did your best, he answered. You can't do well everytime.

Asking forgiveness from someone is a complicated affair, a delicate balancing act between stiff-necked pride and tearful remorse, and unless you can truly open up to the other person, every apology sounds hollow and false.

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 have. And never really there.

there were other ways of living in this world than the one he knew, that his parents' way was not the only way.

One must never own up to a fart in public. That is the unwritten law, the single most stringent protocol of American etiquette. 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.

Silence is not a rewarding response, no matter what it means.

Words do not necessarily work, it is possible for them to obscure the things they are trying to say.

It was filled with books. That was the first thing I noticed when I went in—how many books there were. Three of the four walls were lined with shelves from the floor to the ceiling, and every inch of those shelves was crammed with books. There were further clusters and piles of them on chairs and tables, on the rug, on the desk. Hardcovers and paperbacks, new books and old books

Ali onda, jednoga dana, zidovi vaše ku?e se najzad sruše. Ako vrata ipak još uvek stoje, sve što treba da uradite je da pro?ete kroz njih, i ponovo ste ušli unutra. Prijatno je spavati pod zvezdama. Nema veze ako pada kiša. Sigurno ne?e dugo.

These are treacherous times, and I know how easily perceptions can be twisted by a single word spoken into the wrong ear. Impugn a man's character, and everything that man does is made to seem underhanded, suspect, fraught with double motives.

Entrances do not become exits, and there is nothing to guarantee that the door you walked through a moment ago will still be there when you turn around to look for it again.

He wondered why he turned so sentimental. That's what happened when you have no one to talk to.

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

But even the facts do not always tell the truth.

The book was a work of fiction. Even though it was based on facts, it could tell nothing but lies. I signed the contract, and afterwards I felt like a man who had signed away his soul.

When he talks about the world, then, he is referring to his world, to the small, circumscribed sphere of his own life, and not to the world-at-large, which is too large and too broken for him to have any effect on it.

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.