Real love

Real love, she says, is when you get as much pleasure from giving pleasure as you do from receiving it.

Paul Auster
Invisible

Poetry Vs Justice

From poetry to justice, then. Poetic justice, if you will. For the sad fact remains: there is far more poetry in the world than justice.

Paul Auster
Invisible

Power is the only constant

Bombastic pronouncements, wild generalizations, bitter declarations about the corruption of all governments - past, present and future; left, right and center - and how our so-called civilization was no more than a thin screen masking a never-ending assault of barbarism and cruelty. Human beings were animals, he said, and soft-minded aesthetes like myself were no better than children, diverting ourselves with hairsplitting philosophies of art and literature to avoid confronting the essential truth of the world. Power was the only constant, and the law of life was kill or be killed, either dominate or fall victim to the savagery of monsters.

Paul Auster
Invisible

Vanity

I was also fascinated by this peculiar, unreadable person, and the fact that he seemed genuinely glad to have stumbled into me stoked the fires of my vanity - than invisible cauldron of self-regard and ambition that simmers and burns in each one of us.

Paul Auster
Invisible

War

Never underestimate the importance of war. War is the purest, most vivid expression of the human soul.

Paul Auster
Invisible

The Forces of my uncertainty

And even if there was an end, it seemed doubtful that I would ever know about it - which meant that the story would go on and on, secreting its poison inside me forever. The struggle was to accept that, to coexist with the forces of my uncertainty. Desperate as I was for a resolution, I had to understand that it might never come. You can hold on to your breath for so long, after all. Sooner or later, a moment comes when you have to start breathing again - even if the air is tainted, even if you know it will eventually kill you.

Paul Auster
Leviathan

The nub of catastrophe

An overly refined conscience, a predisposition toward guilt in the face of his own desires, led a good man to act in curiously underhanded ways, in ways that compromised his own goodness. This is the nub of catastrophe, I think. He accepted everyone else's frailties, but when it came to himself he demanded perfection, an almost superhuman rigor in even the smallest acts. The result was disappointment, a dumbfounding awareness of his own flawed humanity, which drove him to place even more stringent demands on his conduct, which in turn led to ever more suffocating disappointments. If he had learned to love himself a little more, he wouldn't have had the power to cause so much unhappiness around him.

Paul Auster
Leviathan

Men are monsters

'Men are monsters,' I said, unable to stop myself. 'They have ants in their pants, and their heads are crammed with filth. Especially when they are young.'

'Not filth,' Fanny said. 'Just hormones.'

'Those too. But sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.'

'You always wore an earnest look on your face,' she said. 'I remember thinking that you must have been a very serious person. One of those young men who was either going to kill himself or change the world.'

'So far, I haven't done either. I guess that means I 've given up my old ambitions.'

'And a good thing, too. You don't want to get stuck in the past. Life is too interesting for that.'

Paul Auster

Leviathan