Paul Auster Quotes

To feel estranged from language is to lose your own body.

To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.

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 todestroy the second.

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...

We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.

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 woul...

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, t...

La lettura di Delitto e castigo lo cambiò, Delitto e castigo fu il fulmine che si abbatté dal cielo e lo mandò in frantumi, e quando riuscí a riprendersi Ferguson non ebbe piú dubbi sul futuro, se un...

The big thing no one was expecting to happen, that no one had ever imagined could happen, was happening in all the unexpected and unimaginable ways that big things tend to happen.

Times i think u were the most cherished trophy i had, but sometimes i think i was the game that you played.

لا شيء أكثر رهبة من مواجهة أغراض رجل مات. الأشياء تهمد أيضًا، فمعناها كامنٌ في دورها خلال حياة صاحبها وحسب.

but even the facts do not always tell the truth

He had understood that memory was a place, a real place that one could visit, and that to spend a few moments among the dead was not necessarily bad for you, that it could in fact be a source of great...

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...

As long as you're dreaming, there's always a way out.

At fifty-seven, I felt old. Now, at seventy-four, I feel much younger than I did then.

Bit by bit, I found myself relaxing into the conversation. Kitty had a natural talent for drawing people out of themselves, and it was easy to fall in with her, to feel comfortable in her presence. As...

He realized that for Ponge there was no division between the work of writing and the work of seeing. For no word can be written without first having been seen, and before it finds its way to the page...

He was there for you, and yet at the same time he was inaccessible. You felt there was a secret core in him that could never be penetrated, a mysterious center of hiddenness. To imitate him was someho...

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 ea...