Quotes by Paul Auster

“but the truly frightening thing was to learn that his mother was no stronger than he was, that the blows of the world hurt her just as much as they hurt him and that except for the fact that she wa...”

“In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so - which amounts to the same thing. The wo...”

“If people never learned the truth about him, then they couldn't turn around and use it against him. The lie was a way of buying protection.”

“That is the idea he is toying with, Renzo says, to write an essay about the things that dont happen, the lives not lived, the wars not fought, the shadow worlds that run parallel to the world we ta...”

“All the happiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room.”

“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.”

“You can't see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether strangers or friends or the m...”

“I know you don't love me but that doesn't mean I'm the wrong girl for you.”

“I couldn't imagine myself doing it anymore. It was part of my life that had ended for me, and here was my chance to set out on a fresh course”

“Try to roll with the punches. Keep your chin up. Dont take any wooden nickels. Vote Democrat in every election. Ride your bike in the park. Dream about my perfect, golden body. Take your vitamins. ...”

“And I am nothing if not a stupid, stupid man.”

“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 f...”

“I was perfectly calm and perfectly insane, perfectly prepared to accept what the moment had offered. Indifference of that magnitude is rare and because it can be achieved only by someone ready to l...”

“Something was wrong, and while Mr. Bones could scarcely imagine what that thing was, Henry's sadness was beginning to have an effect on him, and within a matter of minutes he had taken on the boy's...”

“I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book. It was like living in a padded cell, but of all the lives I could have lived ...”

“If you look into someone's face long enough, eventually you're going to feel that you're looking at yourself.”

“Don't be a writer; it's a terrible way to live your life. There's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that ...”

“Time makes us grow old, but it also gives us the day and the night...Lying is a bad thing. It makes you sorry you were ever born. And not to have been born is a curse. You are condemned to live out...”

“Good begets good; evil begets evil; and even if the good you give is met by evil, you have no choice but to go on giving better than you get. Otherwise-and these were Willy's exact words-why bother...”

“Youre a dreamer, boy, he said. Your mind is on the moon, and from the looks of things, its nevergoing to be anywhere else. You have no ambitions, you dont give a damn about money, and youretoo much...”