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Book: The New York Trilogy
Quotes of Book: The New York Trilogy
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  1. Paul Auster _ The New York Trilogy

    Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within.
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  2. Paul Auster _ The New York Trilogy

    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.
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  3. Paul Auster _ The New York Trilogy

    He has been marked by the past, and once that happens, nothing can bedone about it. Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.
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  4. Paul Auster _ The New York Trilogy

    For several years Quinn had been having the same conversations with this man, whose name he did not know. Once, when he had been in the luncheonette, they had talked about baseball, and now, each time Quinn came in, they continued to talk about it. In the winter, the talk was of trades, predictions, memories. During the season, it was always the most recent game. They were both Mets fans, and the hopelessness of that passion had created a bond between them.
    book-quotehopelessnesssports

  5. Paul Auster _ The New York Trilogy

    We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. 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.
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  6. Paul Auster _ The New York Trilogy

    In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for.
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  7. Paul Auster _ The New York Trilogy

    It was something like the word 'it' in the phrase 'it is raining' or 'it is night'. What that 'it' referred to Quinn had never known
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  8. Paul Auster _ The New York Trilogy

    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 world of the book comes to life, seething with possibilities, with secrets and contradictions. Since everything seen or said, even the slightest, most trivial thing, can bear a connection to the outcome of the story, nothing must be overlooked. Everything becomes essence; the center of the book shifts with each event that propels it forward. The center, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book has come to its end.
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  9. Paul Auster _ The New York Trilogy

    you can't punish someone for a lack of affection, can you? You can't force a child to love you just because he's your child.
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  10. Paul Auster _ The New York Trilogy

    On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he has no intention of ever leaving it again.
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  11. Paul Auster _ The New York Trilogy

    in the end, each life is irreducible to anything other than itself. Which is as much as to say: lives make no sense.
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  12. Paul Auster _ The New York Trilogy

    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.
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