4 3 2 1 QUOTES

2 " (...) Taking the journalist's vow of impartiality and objectivity was not unlike joining an order of monks and spending the rest of your life in a glass monastery - removed from the world of human affairs even as it continued to whirl around you on all sides. To be a journalist meant you could never be the person who tossed the brick through the window that started the revolution. You could only watch the man toss the brick, you could try to understand why he had tossed the brick, you could explain to others what significance the brick had in starting the revolution, but you yourself could never toss the brick or even stand in the mob that was urging the man to throw it. "

― Paul Auster , 4 3 2 1

4 " the world as it was could never be more than a fraction of the world, for the real also consisted of what could have happened but didn’t, that one road was no better or worse than any other road, but the torment of being alive in a single body was that at any given moment you had to be on one road only, even though you could have been on another, traveling toward an altogether different place. "

― Paul Auster , 4 3 2 1

6 " I'm saying you'll never know if you made the wrong choice or not. You would need to have all the facts before you knew, and the only way to get all the facts is to be in two places at the same time--which is impossible. "

― Paul Auster , 4 3 2 1

8 " The world wasn’t real anymore. Everything in it was a fraudulent copy of what it should have been, and everything that happened in it shouldn’t have been happening. For a long time afterward, Ferguson lived under the spell of this illusion, sleepwalking through his days and struggling to fall asleep at night, sick of a world he had stopped believing in, doubting everything that presented itself to his eyes. "

― Paul Auster , 4 3 2 1

10 " an exercise in the art of paying attention, and paying attention, Ferguson discovered, was the first step in learning how to be alive. "

― Paul Auster , 4 3 2 1

12 " The gods looked down from their mountain and shrugged. "

― Paul Auster , 4 3 2 1

14 " Anything was possible, and just because things happened in one way didn't mean they couldn' t happen in another. "

― Paul Auster , 4 3 2 1

16 " The big event that rips through the heart of things and changes life for everyone, the unforgettable moment when something ends and something else begins. Was that what this was, he asked himself, a moment similar to the outbreak of war? No, not quite. War announces the beginning of a new reality, but nothing had begun today, a reality had ended, that was all, something had been subtracted from the world, and now there was a hole, a nothing where there had once been a something, as if every tree in the world had vanished, as if the very concept of tree or mountain had been erased from the human mind. "

― Paul Auster , 4 3 2 1

18 " because he was a man who had suffered but because he was a man who had suffered and could still crack jokes. "

― Paul Auster , 4 3 2 1

20 " la lettura di Delitto e castigo lo cambiò, Delitto e castigo fu il fulmine che si abbatté dal cielo e lo mandò in frantumi, e quando riuscí a riprendersi Ferguson non ebbe piú dubbi sul futuro, se un libro poteva essere questo, se un romanzo poteva fare questo al tuo cuore, alla tua mente e ai tuoi sentimenti piú profondi sul mondo, allora scrivere romanzi era senz’altro la cosa migliore che potevi fare nella vita, perché Dostoevskij gli aveva insegnato che le storie inventate potevano andare ben oltre il semplice divertimento e lo svago, potevano rivoltarti come un calzino e scoperchiarti il cervello, potevano scottarti e gelarti e metterti completamente a nudo e scaraventarti tra i venti furiosi dell’universo e da quel giorno in poi, dopo aver annaspato per tutta l’infanzia, perso nei miasmi sempre piú fitti dello smarrimento, finalmente Ferguson capí dove stava andando, e negli anni successivi non tornò mai sulla sua decisione, nemmeno in quelli piú duri, quando gli sembrò quasi di cadere dai confini della terra. Aveva solo quindici anni, ma aveva già sposato un’idea, e il giovane Ferguson decise di onorarla, nella buona o nella cattiva sorte, in ricchezza o in povertà, in salute o in malattia, per tutta la vita. "

― Paul Auster , 4 3 2 1