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Moon Palace QUOTES

Moon Palace QUOTES

1 " I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity. "

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace

2 " 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. "

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace

3 " 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. "

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace

4 " For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things. "

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace

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

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace

6 " You’re a dreamer, boy,” he said. “Your mind is on the moon, and from the looks of things, it’s never
going to be anywhere else. You have no ambitions, you don’t give a damn about money, and you’re
too much of a philosopher to have any feeling for art. What am I going to do with you? You need
someone to look after you, to make sure you have food in your belly and a bit of cash in your pocket.
Once I’m gone, you’ll be right back where you started. "

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace

7 " 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. "

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace

8 " No one was to blame for what happened, but that does not make it any less difficult to accept. It was all a matter of missed connections, bad timing, blundering in the dark. We were always in the right place at the wrong time, the wrong place at the right time, always just missing each other, always just a few inches from figuring the whole thing out. That's what the story boils down to, I think. A series of lost chances. All the pieces were there from the beginning, but no one knew how to put them together. "

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace

9 " and now we get to the hard part. the endings, the farewells, and the famous last words. if you don't hear from me often, remember that you're in my thoughts. "

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace

10 " We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not. "

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace

11 " Every man is the author of his own life. "

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace

12 " It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions. "

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace

13 " Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young. "

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace

14 " The room was a machine that measured my condition: how much of me remained, how much of me was no longer there. I was both perpetrator and witness, both actor and audience in a theater of one. I could follow the progress of my own dismemberment. Piece by piece, I could watch myself dissapear. "

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace

15 " ... that once you throw your life to the winds, you will discover things you had never known before, things that cannot be learned under any other circumstances. "

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace

16 " I became hypnotized by my own loneliness, unwilling to stop until my eyes wouldn't stay open anymore, watching the white line of the highway as though it was the last thing that connected me to the earth. "

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace

17 " That was the trouble. The land is too big out there, and after a while it starts to swallow you up. I reached a point when I couldn't take it anymore. All that bloody silence and emptiness. You try to find your bearings in it, but it's too big, the dimensions are too monstrous, and eventually, I don't know how else to put it, eventually it just stops being there. There's no world, no land, no nothing. It comes down to that, Fogg, in the end it's all a figment. The only place you exist is in your head. "

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace

18 " Guilt kept me going. It was impossible not to blame myself for what had happened, but even guilt was a comfort. It was a human feeling, a sign that I was still attached to the same world that other men lived in. "

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace

19 " A here exists only in relation to a there, not the other way around. There's this only because there's that; if we don't look up, we'll never know what's down. Think of it, boy. We find ourselves only by looking what we're not. You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky. "

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace

20 " If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics "

― Paul Auster , Moon Palace