728 Quotes by Paul Auster

Even before his death he had been absent, and long ago the people closest to him had learned to accept this absence, to treat it as the fundamental quality of his being. Now that he was gone, it would not be difficult for the world to absorb the fact that he was gone forever. The nature of his life had prepared the world for his death – had been a kind of death by anticipation – and if and when he was remembered, it would be dimly, no more than dimly.

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.

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

Our hearts know what is in them, even if our mouths remain silent. And the world will know what it is, even when nothing remains in our hearts.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

Time moved in two directions because every step into the future carried a memory of the past.

My true place in the world, it turned out, was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and not-self, and for the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact center of the world.

There is a double rhythm in all human beings. We are binary beings – two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears. Two legs for walking. And the heartbeat thumping in our chest mirrors that.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.