Quotes from Paul Auster

I stood up from my seat and made my way for the exit downstairs. Outside, the early evening assaulted me with light, surrounded me with sudden warmth. This is what I deserve, I said to myself. I've made my nothing, and now I've got to live in it.

BEFORE THE BODY, there is the face, and before the face there is the thin black line between Hector's nose and upper lip. A twitching filament of anxieties, a metaphysical jump rope, a dancing thread of discombobulation, the mustache is a seismograph of Hector's inner states, and not only does it make you laugh, it tells you what Hector is thinking, actually allows you into the machinery of his thoughts.

If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics.

Whatever you see has the potential to wound you, to make you less than you are, as if merely by seeing a thing some part of yourself were taken away from you.

A man walks out from the voice that became me. He has vanished. He has eaten the ripening word that killed you and killed you

Whenever his eye or mind seems to stop, he discovers another connection, another bridge to carry him to yet another place, and even in the solitude of his room, the world has been rushing in on him at a dizzying speed, as if it were all suddenly converging in him and happening to hm at once.

When every card in the deck is stacked against you, the only way to win a hand is to break the rules.

Cuanto más cerca estás del final, más tienes que decir. El final es sólo imaginario, un destino que te inventas para seguir andando, pero llega un momento en que adviertes que nunca llegarás allí. Es probable que tengas que detenerte, pero será sólo porque te ha faltado tiempo. Te detienes, pero eso no quiere decir que hayas llegado al fin.

vlastito tijelo nastanjivala je poput ma?ke. Nije mi bila toliko lijepa koliko egzoti?na, premda je izraz možda pretjeran za ono što želim re?i. Sposobnost da se ostavi dojam, bilo bi to vjerojatno to?nije onomu što pokušavam re?i, odre?eni samodostatni izgled koji je ?ovjeka tjerao da je poželi gledati ?ak i kad bi samo besposleno sjedila

According to them, when you think a dark or pessimistic thought, it produces a cloud in the sky. If enough people are thinking gloomy thoughts at once, then rain will begin to fall. That

That was sixty-five springs ago, and I can still see him sitting at his desk, scribbling away at his youthful memoirs as the light poured through the window, catching the dust particles that danced around him. If I concentrate hard enough, I can still hear the breath going in and out of his lungs, I can still hear the point of his pen scratching across the paper.

There was this certainty inside me, and it destroyed everything else. The moment Ferdinand touched me, I knew that I was going to kill him, and the certainty was so great, so overpowering, that I almost wanted to stop and tell him about it, just so he would be able to understand what I thought of him and why he deserved to be dead.

Life can last just so long, you understand. Everything else is in the room, with darkness, with God's language, with screams. Here I am of the air, a beautiful thing for the light to shine on.

For it is his belief that if there is a voice of truth - assuming there is such a thing as truth, and assuming this truth can speak - it comes from the mouth of a woman.

It's not just that things vanish--but once they vanish, the memory of them vanishes as well. Dark areas form in the brain, and unless you make a constant effort to summon up the things that are gone, they will quickly be lost to you forever...try to remember it, try to memorise all the beautiful things you are seeing, and in that way they will always be with you, even when you can't see them anymore... I wanted everything to belong to me, for all that beauty to be a part of what I was.

Causality was no longer the hidden demiurge that ruled the universe: down was up, the last was the first, the end was the beginning. Heraclitus had been resurrected from his dung heap, and what he had to show us was the simplest of truths: reality was a yo-yo, change was the only constant.

But it does matter, Archie. Everything matters.

It's just that we shared a certain language, and when she talked to me about her past, I understood her without having to ask for explanations.

and cut down many trees. When the Humans

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. And? And that's why people believe in God.

Poets are everywhere now, but they talk only to each other

I gave up trying to be anyone," he said. "The object of my life was to remove myself from my surroundings, to live in a place where nothing could hurt me anymore. One by one, I tried to abandon my attachments, to let go of all the things I ever cared about. The idea was to achieve indifference, an indifference so powerful and sublime that it would protect me from further assault.

I think I would like that, knowing it had wound up in that room. Up on one of the shelves above my bed, for example, along with my old dolls and the ballerina costume I had when I was seven--one last thing to remember me by.

those men worked in order to live, whereas his father seemed to live in order to work, which meant that his parents' friends were defined more by their enthusiasms than their burdens or responsibilities,