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Paul Auster

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Famous Paul Auster Quotes

“No one was to blame for what happened, but that does not make it any less difficult to accept. It was all a matter of missed connections, bad timing, blundering in the dark. We were always in the right place at the wrong time, the wrong place at the right time, always just missing each other, always just a few inches from figuring the whole thing out. That's what the story boils down to, I think. A series of lost chances. All the pieces were there from the beginning, but no one knew how to put them together.”

ThinkingDoeMatterWholeStoriesTogetherLostDifficultDarkChanceAcceptingPiecesHappenedMissingConnectionsBlameSeriesInchesTimingRight TimeRight PlaceWrong TimeBad TimingMissed ConnectionsMissing Each Other
Book:Moon Palace: A Novel (Penguin Ink)
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“We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.”

EndsReasonSimpleOur LivesGoes OnGainsCrossesAccessBoundariesWho We AreLife Goes OnOpaqueIncoherence
Book:The New York Trilogy
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“Yes, she is in love with him, and yes, in spite of his qualms and inner hesitations, he loves her back, however improbable that might seem to him. Note here for the record that he is not someone with a special fixation on young girls. Until now, all the women in his life have been more or less his own age. Pilar therefore does not represent an embodiment of some ideal female type for him--she is merely herself, a small piece of luck he stumbled across one afternoon in a public park, an exception to every rule.”

DoeHas BeensSeemsMightAgeYoungGirlRecordsPiecesSpecialTypeFemaleIdealsLuckNotesParksSpiteExceptionAfternoonHesitationEmbodimentImprobableFixationSmall PiecesQualms
Book:Collected Novels Volume Four
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“Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is intractable, here all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But whether one can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirely”

IfsKnowsMenWayHumansDoeMatterCan DoRealizingHuman BeingsKnownImpossibleWillingColdSolitudeDegreesMake SenseShiver
Author:Paul Auster
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“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 his surface to others. There are few demands to be met, and no commitment is required. Marriage, on the other hand, closes the door. Your existence is confined to a narrow space in which you are constantly forced to reveal yourself – and therefore, constantly obliged to look into yourself, to examine your own depths.”

MenLooksHandsNaturalSpaceExistenceDoorsMetsDemandCommitmentDepthSurfaceSatisfiedStayingOfferingObligedConfinedTolerableNo Commitment
Book:Collected Prose
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“There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. […] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself.”

MenEndsUseFacesDecisionConsciousnessObjectsTerribleSolitudeStandingFunctionThings ChangeDead ManStanding ThereRemnantsEmblems
Author:Paul Auster
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“Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist - except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.”

WayWantGivingWritingYearsDoeHandsAbleEarthOrderChoicesHoursAnswersRoomsStrugglePiecesBirthPaperSittingCome UpOddPensAfter HoursSitting Alone
Author:Paul Auster
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“At that point, Noriko finally breaks down and begins to cry sobbing into her hands as the floodgates open - this young woman who has suffered in silence for so long, this good woman who refuse to believe she's good, for only the good doubt their own goodness, which is what makes them good in the first place. The bad know they are good, but the good know nothing. They spend their lives forgiving others, but they can't forgive themselves.”

KnowsFirstsBelieveLongHandsYoungSilenceBreakDoubtCryGoodnessDown AndForgivingRefuseYoung WomenBreaking DownGood WomanSobbingForgiving OthersCan't Forgive
Author:Paul Auster
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“Bodies count, of course - they count more than we're willing to admit - but we don't fall in love with bodies, we fall in love with each other. We all know that, but the moment we go beyond a catalogue of surface qualities and appearances, words begin to fail us, to crumble apart in mystical confusions and cloudy, unsubstantial metaphors.”

KnowsMomentsBodyFallCoursesQualityFailingWillingFalling In LoveMetaphorAppearanceSurfaceConfusionMysticalCloudyCataloguesDon't Fall In Love
Book:Oracle Night: A Novel
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“For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.”

WorldWayFirstsArtMightBeautifulPurposeIndividualLostUnderstandingTermResultsEffortQualityWorryStruggleObjectsProductsFindingsConsequenceFirst TimeMethodOneselfAestheticThickCanvasSuccess And FailureTrue PurposePurpose Of ArtBeautiful Objects
Book:Moon Palace: A Novel (Penguin Ink)
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“Then, without any warning, we both straightened up, turned towards each other, and began to kiss. After that, it is difficult for me to speak of what happened. Such things have little to do with words, so little, in fact, that it seems almost pointless to try to express them. If anything, I would say that we were falling into each other, that we were falling so fast and so far that nothing could catch us.”

IfsTryingLittlesFactsSeemsFallSpeakDifficultHappenedKissingWarningPointless
Book:The locked room
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“Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else.”

WayOrderExamplePrayingSolitaryRetreatBellyWhalesDeliveranceJonah
Book:The Invention of Solitude
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