Quotessence
Home / Authors / Paul Auster
Paul Auster

Paul Auster Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

AllThinkingWritingBookIfsWorldPeopleWayStoriesNovelFeels

Famous Paul Auster Quotes

“I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden, without the slightest flicker of a doubt, I understood that my life was my own, that it belonged to me and no one else. I’m talking about freedom, Fogg. A sense of despair that becomes so great, so crushing, so catastrophic, that you have no choice but to be liberated by it. That’s the only choice, or else you crawl into a corner and die.”

LifePhilosophyFreedomSelf DeterminationAdulthood
Book:Moon Palace
Create image

“Think of the satisfaction [...] of crawling into bed and knowing that your dreams are about to take place on top of nineteenth-century American literature. Imagine the pleasure of sitting down to a meal with the entire Renaissance lurking below your food. In point of fact, I had no idea which books were in which boxes, but I was a great one for making up stories back then, and I liked the sound of those sentences, even if they were false.”

StoriesImaginationBooksLies
Book:Moon Palace
Create image

“Today, as never before: the tramps, the down-and-outs, the shopping-bag ladies, the drifters and drunks. They range from the merely destitute to the wretchedly broken. Wherever you turn, they are there, in good neighborhoods and bad. Some beg with a semblance of pride. Give me this money, they seem to say, and soon I will be back there with the rest of you, rushing back and forth on my daily rounds. Others have given up hope of ever leaving their tramphood. They lie there sprawled out on the sidewalk with their hat, or cup, or box, not even bothering to look up at the passerby, too defeated even to thank the ones who drop a coin beside them. Still others try to work for the money they are given: the blind pencil sellers, the winos who wash the windshield of your car. Some tell stories, usually tragic accounts of their own lives, as if to give their benefactors something for their kindness—even if only words.”

PovertyKindnessHomelessnessDestituteTrampsCity Of GlassDestitutionPaul AusterNew York TrilogyThe New York Trilogy
Book:City of Glass
Create image

“She could have been there all along, he felt, but for some unknown, unarticulated reason, she had never lifted a finger to put her poems into circulation. It was the thing that had baffled him most about her, for in all other ways Anna was a person who stood up for herself and fought hard for what she believed in, and she knew damned well that her poems were good. Doubts, yes, despairing moments, yes, but what writer or artist doesn’t live in that shifting territory between confidence and self-contempt? The proof was in the fact that she had always shared her poems with him, not because he ever asked her but because she wanted to, either reading them out loud or handing him small sheafs of six or seven at once, and again and again he had responded to her new work by saying it was time to get off her ass and start publishing them, which was invariably followed by a diffident shrug from Anna, who sometimes added “You’re right” or “One of these days” or “We’ll see”, depending on her mood.”

PoetryDespairPoemsWriterSelf Contempt
Book:Baumgartner
Create image

“The difference was not that one was a pessimist and the other an optimist, it was that one's pessimism had led to an ethos of fear, and the other's pessimism had led to a noisy, fractious disdain for Everything-That-Was. One shrank, the other flailed. One toed the line, the other crossed it out. Much of the time they were at loggerheads, and because Willy found it so easy to shock his mother, he rarely wasted an opportunity to provoke an argument. If only she'd the wit to back off a little, he probably wouldn't have been so insistent about making his points. Her antagonism inspired him, pushed him into ever more extreme positions, and by the time he was ready to leave the house and go off to college, he had indelibly cast himself in his chosen role: as malcontent, as rebel, as outlaw poet prowling the gutters of a ruined world.”

MotherSonOptimismRebellionPessimism
Book:Timbuktu
Create image

“El inventario de tus cicatrices, en particular las de la cara, que ves cada mañana al mirarte en el espejo del baño cuando te peinas o vas a afeitarte. Rara vez piensas en ellas, pero cuando lo haces, entiendes que son marcas que deja la vida, que el surtido de líneas irregulares grabadas en la piel de tu rostro son letras del alfabeto secreto que narra la historia de quién eres, porque cada cicatriz es la huella de una herida curada, y cada herida era resultado de una inesperada colisión con el mundo; es decir, de un accidente, de algo que no debía ocurrir a la fuerza, porque por definición un accidente es algo que no sucede necesariamente. Acontecimientos contingentes en contraposición a hechos necesario, y mientras te miras al espejo esta mañana comprendes que toda vida es contingente, salvo por el único hecho necesario de que antes o después tocará a su fin.”

FateScarsAccident
Author:Paul Auster
Create image

“And if, as all philosophers on the subject have noted, art is a human activity that relies on the senses to reach the soul, did it not also stand to reason that dogs -- at least dogs of Mr. Bones' caliber -- would have it in them to feel a similar aesthetic impulse? Would they not, in other words, be able to appreciate art? As far as Willy knew, no one had ever thought of this before. Did that make him the first man in recorded history to believe such a thing was possible? No matter. It was an idea whose time had come. If dogs were beyond the pull of oil paintings and string quartets, who was to say they wouldn't respond to an art based on the sense of smell? Why not an olfactory art? Why not an art for dogs that dealt with the world as dogs knew it?”

ArtEmpathyAnimalsAesthetics
Book:Timbuktu
Create image

“Stars, on the other hand, were inexplicable. Not holes in the sky, not candles, not electric lights, not anything that resembled what you knew. The immensity of the black air overhead, the vastness of the space that stood between you and those small luminosities, was something that resisted all understanding. Benign and beautiful presences hovering in the night, there because they were there and for no other reason. The work of God's hands, yes, but what in the world had he been thinking?”

StarsSpaceMemoirStar Quotes
Book:Report from the Interior
Create image

“بمكوثه في الغرفة لفترات طويلة من الزمن ومتصلة يقوم بشحن فراغ الغرفة بالأفكار ، لهذا يتسبب خروجه من الغرفة في تبديد الحميمية التي يحاول نسجها ، أو يجعلها غير ملموسة على الأقل. يجر أفكاره معه متى ما خرج وأثناء فترة الغياب تلك تقوم الغرفة بتفريغ نفسها ومحو كل جهوده لسكناها وجعلها مأهولة ، عليه أن يبدأ كل شئ من جديد عندما يعود ، وهذا يتطلب جهدا مضنيا وعملا روحيا ضخما”

SolitudeAlone
Book:The Invention of Solitude
Create image

“Yes, it is possible that we do not grow up, that even as we grow old, we remain the children we always were. We remember ourselves as we were then, and we feel ourselves to be the same. We made ourselves into what we are now then, and we remain what we were, in spite of the years. We do not change for ourselves. Time makes us grow old, but we do not change.”

PhilosophyTimeChangeGrowing UpIdentityAuthenticityChangesOurselves
Book:The Invention of Solitude
Create image

“Some people are able to tell a more or less truthful story about themselves. Others are fantasists. Their sense of who they are is so at odds with what the rest of the world feels about them that they become pathetic … Then, there’s the other extreme, the people who diminish themselves in their own minds. They’re often much greater people than they think they are and, often, much admired by others. Still, they kill themselves inside. Almost by definition, the good are hard on themselves – and the less than good believe they’re the best.”

Character
Author:Paul Auster
Create image

“إنه دائم الغياب منذ ما قبل رحيله فقد اعتاد القريبون منه على تقبل عزلته و اختفاءه عنهم منذ وقت بعيد وعلى اعتبار ذاك الغياب خصيصة جوهرية لوجوده ، لهذا وقد رحل الآن لن يكون صعبا على العالم استيعاب حقيقة غيابه الأبدي. لقد قامت طبيعة حياته بتهيئة العالم لموته فقد كانت نوعا من الموت الاستباقي ، و إذا ما جاء أحد على ذكره فسيتم ذلك بصورة باهتة وبصوت خافت لا أكثر”

DeathSolitude
Book:The Invention of Solitude
Create image

“عندما يموت الأب يصير الإبن أبا نفسه و ابن نفسه في نفس الوقت. ينظر إلى وجه طفله ويرى نفسه في وجه الصبي ، يتخيل ما الذي يراه الصبي عندما يلتفت نحوه وينظر إلى وجهه و يتكشّف للصبي أنه أبو نفسه. ولسبب غامض يجد نفسه مأخوذا بهذه الفكرة ، ليس منظر الصبي مكتشفا الحقائق هو ما دوّخه باللذة ، ولا حتى فكرة أنه يقف داخل أبيه ، ولكن الذي يراه في وجه الصبي من حياته الماضية المتلاشية. إنها حالة من "النوستالجيا" لحياته نفسها ، هذا ما يشعر به ، ربما ذكرى لطفولته كابن لوالده. ولسبب غامض أيضا يجد نفسه يرتعش في تلك اللحطة من الفرح ومن الأسى معا -لو كان هذا ممكنا- وكأنه يتقدم وفي نفس الوقت يتخلف ، نحو المستقبل ونحو الماضي معا. وهناك أوقات ، ودائما ما كانت هناك مثل هذه الأوقات ، عندما تكون هذه المشاعر في أشد قوتها وانفلاتها ، حتى يعود غير واثق من أن حياته تقيم في الزمن الحاضر”

NostalgiaFather And Son
Book:The Invention of Solitude
Create image

“the sage Lenny Millstein, who not only was an excellent basketball man but an excellent person as well, who knew how to handle fourteen-year-old boys because he understood that fourteen was the worst possible age on the calendar of human life, and therefore all fourteen-year-olds were confused and fractured beings, not one of them a child anymore and not one of them an adult, none quite right in the head or at home in his unfinished body, and in the furnace of that claustrophobic arena of”

Childhood
Book:4 3 2 1
Create image