Paul Auster

“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.”

“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”

“Language, then, not simply as a list of separate things to be added up and whose sum total is equal to the world. Rather, language as it is laid out in the dictionary: an infinitely complex organism, all of whose elements […] are present in the world simultaneously, none of which can exist on its own. For each word is defined by other words, which means that to enter any part of language is to enter the whole of it”

“Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude”

“Since all is plenum, all matter is connected and all movement in the plenum produces some effect on the distant bodies, in proportion to the distance. Hence every body is affected not only by those with which is in contact, and thus feels in some way everything that happens to them; but through them it also feels those that touch the ones with which it is in immediate contact. Hence it follows that the communication extends over any distance whatever. Consequently, every body experiences everything that goes on in the universe, so much so that he who sees everything might read in any body what is happening anywhere, and even what has happened or will happen”

“that each ejaculation contains several billion sperm cells –or roughly the same number as there are people in the world– which means that, in himself, each man holds the potential of an entire world. And what would happen, could it happen, is the full range of possibilities: a spawn of idiots and geniuses, of the beautiful and the deformed, of saints, catatonics, thieves, stock brokers, and high-wire artists. Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or, as Leibniz put it: “Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.”

“A crisscross of light and shadow began to form on the pavement in front of him, and it was a beautiful thing to behold, he felt, a small, unexpected gift on the heels of such sadness and pain.”

“If I hit that tree with this stone, Rousseau says, all will go well in my life from now on. He throws and misses. That one didn't count, he says, so he picks up another stone and moves several yards closer to the tree. He misses again. That one didn't count either, he says, and then he moves still closer to the tree and finds another stone. Again he misses. That was just the final warm up toss, he says, it's the next one that really counts. But just to make sure, he walks right up to the tree this time, positioning himself directly in front of the tree. He is no more than a foot away from it by now, close enough to touch it with his hand. The he lobs the stone squarely against the trunk. Success, he says to himself, I've done it. From this moment on, life will be better for me than ever before.Nashe found it amusing but at the same time he was too embarrassed by it to want to laugh. There was something terrible about such candor, finally, and he wondered where Rousseau had found the courage to reveal such a thing about himself, to admit to such naked self deception.”

“The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.”

“Les moments de crise produsent un redoublement de vie chez les hommes.Moments of crisis produce a redoubled vitality in men. Or, more succinctly perhaps: Men don't begin to live fully until thier backs are against the wall.”

“They had come to the end of what they could talk about. Beyond that point there was nothing: the random thoughts of men who knew nothing.”

“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.”

“...and when she thinks of that generation of silent men, the boys who lived through the Depression and grew up to become soldiers or not-soldiers in the war, she doesn’t blame them for refusing to talk, for not wanting to go back into the past, but how curious it is, she thinks, how sublimely incoherent that her generation, which doesn’t have much of anything to talk about yet, has produced men who never stop talking, men like Bing, for example, or men like Jake, who talks about himself at the slightest prompting, who has an opinion on every subject, who spews forth words from morning to night, but just because he talks, that doesn’t mean she wants to listen to him, whereas with the silent men, the old men, the ones who are nearly gone now, she would give anything to hear what they have to say.”

“what at first had seemed to be no more than a small bump in the road was turned into a full-scale misfortune”

“But that was the beauty of this particular game. The moment you lost, you won.”

“...once you fell in love with her, youloved her until the day you died.”

“He slipped away slowly, withdrawing from this world by small, imperceptible degrees, and in the end it was as ifhe were a drop of water evaporating in the sun, shrinking and shrinking until at last he wasn’t there anymore.”

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

“Eds atbildot kaut ko noņurd un piedāvā Bovenam apsēsties, negaidīti pieminēdams fragmentu no "Voldenas", kad ar žestu norāda uz vienīgo krēslu istabā. Toro teica, ka viņa mājā esot trīs krēsli, Eds ieminas. Viens vientulībai, otrs draudzībai un trešais sabiedrībai. Man ir tikai viens krēsls vientulībai. Ja vēl piemer klāt gultu, varbūt sanāk divi draudzībai.”

“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.”

“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 Uncle Victor had once told me long ago, a conversation is like having a catch with someone. A good partner tosses the ball directly into your glove, making it almost impossible for you to miss it; when he is on the receiving end, he catches everything sent his way, even the most errant and incompetent throws. That’s what Kitty did. She kept lobbing the ball straight into the pocket of my glove, and when I threw the ball back to her, she hauled in everything that was even remotely in her area: jumping up to spear balls that soared above her head, diving nimbly to her left or right, charging in to make tumbling, shoestring catches. More than that, her skill was such that she always made me feel that I had made those bad throws on purpose, as if my only object had been to make the game more amusing. She made me seem better than I was, and that strengthened my confidence, which in turn helped to make my throws less difficult for her to handle. In other words, I started talking to her rather than to myself, and the pleasure of it was greater than anything I had experienced in a long time.”

“It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.”

“Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.”

“Here I am of the air, a beautiful thing for the light to shine on. Perhaps you will remember that. I am...”

“He who lives for an encounter with the unseen becomes the instrument of the seen.”

“Toute la scène avait quelque chose d’imaginaire. J’étais conscient qu’elle était réelle, mais en même temps c’était mieux que la réalité, plus proche d’une projection de ce que j’attendais de la réalité que tout ce qui m’étais arrivé auparavant.Avec le temps, je commençai à remarquer que les bonnes choses m’arrivaient que lorsque j’avais renoncé à les espérer.”

“Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.”

“Most lives vanish. A person dies, and little by little all traces of that life disappear. An inventor survives in his inventions, an architect survives in his buildings, but most people leave behind no monuments or lasting achievements: a shelf of photograph albums, a fifth-grade report card, a bowling trophy, an ashtray filched from a Florida hotel room on the final morning of some dimly remembered vacation. A few objects, a few documents, and a smattering of impressions made on other people. Those people invariably tell stories about the dead person, but more often than not dates are scrambled, facts are left out, and the truth becomes increasingly distorted, and when those people die in their turn, most of the stories vanish with them.”

“Con men and tricksters run the world. Rascals rule. And do you know why?because they are hungier than we are. because they know what they want. because they believe in life more than we do.”

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

“there is only this world and that numbing routines and brief squabbles and financial worries are an essential part of it, that in spite of the aches and boredomes and disappointments, living in this world is the closest we will ever come to seeing paradise.”

“The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.”

“All children are love children, he said, but only the best ones are ever called that.”

“For me, books were not the containers of words so much as the words themselves, and the value of a given book was determined by its spiritual quality rather than its physical condition.”

“George Washington chopped down the tree, and then he threw away the money. Do you understand? He was telling us an essential truth. Namely, that money doesn't grow on trees. This is what made our country great, Peter. Now George Washington's picture is on every dollar bill. There is an important lesson to be learned from all this.”

“It was too small a step,somehow, too puny a thing to settle for after having lost somuch. So the courtship continued, and the more Tom came todespise his job, the more stubbornly he defended his own inertia;and the more inert he became, the more he despised himself.”

“when a man's only assets are the brain in his head and thetongue in his mouth, he has to think carefully before he decidesto open that mouth and speak.”

“That work was what appealed to him most about their conversations.Tom liked having to think fast, and he found it invigoratingto push his mind in unaccustomed directions for a change,to be forced to stay on his toes.”

“That was all he had ever aspired to, with a wife thrown into thebargain, maybe, and a kid or two to go along with her. It hadnever felt like too much to ask for, but after three years of strugglingto write his dissertation, Tom finally understood that hedidn't have it in him to finish. Or, if he did have it in him, hecouldn't persuade himself to believe in the value of doing itanymore.”

“More often than not, these attempts at sociability ended in painful silence. His old friends, who remembered him as a brilliant student and wickedly funny conversationalist, were appalled by what had happened to him. Tom had slipped from the ranks of the anointed, and his downfall seemed to shake their confidence in themselves, to open the door onto a new pessimism about their own prospects in life. It didn't help matters that Tom had gained weight, that his former plumpness now verged on an embarrassing rotundity, but even more disturbing was the fact that he didn't seem to have any plans, that he never spoke about how he was going to undo the damage he'd done to himself and get back on his feet. Whenever he mentioned his new job, he described it in odd, almost religious terms, speculating on such questions as spiritual strength and the importance of finding one's path through patience and humility, and this confused them and made them fidget in their chairs. Tom's intelligence had not been dulled by the job, but no one wanted to hear what he had to say anymore, least of all the women he talked to, who expected young men to be full of brave ideas and clever schemes about how they were going to conquer the world. Tom put them off with his doubts and soul-searchings, his obscure disquisitions on the nature of reality, his hesitant manner. It was bad enough that he drove a taxi for a living, but a philosophical taxi driver who dressed in army-navy clothes and carried a paunch around his middle was a bit too much to ask. He was a pleasant guy, of course, and no one actively disliked him, but he wasn't a legitimate candidate?not for marriage, not even for a crazy fling.”

“and if he could survivethe experience without completely losing heart, then perhapsthere was some hope for him after all.By sticking with thecab, he wasn't trying to make the best of a bad situation. Hewas looking for a way to make things happen, and until he understoodwhat those things were, he wouldn't have the right torelease himself from his bondage.”

“Farts come from noone and nowhere; they are anonymous emanations that belongto the group as a whole, and even when every person in theroom can point to the culprit, the only sane course of action isdenial.”

“When she was three, I sent her to day care for a coupleof hours every morning. After a few weeks, the teachercalled me and said that she was worried about Lucy. When itwas time for the children to have their milk, Lucy would alwayshang back until all the other kids had taken a carton beforeshe'd take one for herself. The teacher didn't understand. Goget your milk, she'd say to Lucy, but Lucy would always waitaround until there was just one carton left. It took a while for meto figure it out. Lucy didn't know which carton was supposed tobe her milk. She thought all the other kids knew which oneswere theirs, and if she waited until there was only one carton inthe box, that one had to be hers. Do you see what I'm talkingabout, Uncle Nat? She's a little weird—but intelligent weird, ifyou know what I mean. Not like anyone else. If I hadn't usedthe wordjust, you would have known where I was all along . . .”

“Not to me," I said.Kafka wrote his first story in one night. Stendhal wrote TheCharterhouse of Parma in forty-nine days. Melville wrote Moby-Dick in sixteen months. Flaubert spent five years on MadameBovary. Musil worked for eighteen years on The Man WithoutQualities and died before he could finish. Do we care about anyof that now?”

“In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.”

“The truth of the story lies in the details.”

“Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on living on the moon for the rest of my life.”

“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.”

“Todo lo inanimado se desintegraba, todo lo viviente moría. Cada vez que pensaba en esto notaba latidos en la cabeza al imaginar los furiosos y acelrados movimientos de las moléculas, las incesantes explosiones de la materia, el hirviente caos oculto bajo la superficie de todas las cosas.”

“it's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes--all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom”