Paul Auster Quotes

There is no Jesus without Judas, no Martin Luther King, Jr., without the Klan; no Ali without Joe Frazier; no freedom without tyranny. No wisdom exists that does not include perspective. Relativity is the greatest gift.

There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

To know one thing, you must know the opposite.

Without the existence of the opposite, the concept has no meaning.

Could you understand the meaning of light if there were no darkness to point the contrast? Day and night, life and death, love and hatred, since none of these things can have any being at all apart from the existence of the other, you can no more separate them than you can separate the two sides of a coin.

What is and what is not create each other.

I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for.

There's the tree with the branches that everyone sees, and then there's the upside-down root tree, growing the opposite way. So Earth is the branches, growing in opposing but perfect symmetry. The branches don't think much about the roots, and maybe the roots don't think much about the branches, but all the time, they're connected by the trunk, you know?

An increase in light gives an increase in darkness.

In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.

Listen, the obvious thing to remember is without dark, there is no light, and without light, there is no dark.

Just as we have two eyes and two feet, duality is part of life.

You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in.

I think the phrase that resonates from 'Just One Year' is something I sort of live by: 'The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.'

Angels are not complete, they need their counterparts, the dark needs the bright, the hidden needs the open, and vice versa. Sometimes they meet and recognise each other. Sometimes, as with Horatio and me, the pairing occurs over spaces of time and distance.

Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity.

You can't have an up without a down, a right without a left, a back without a front - or a happy without a sad.

The reverse side also has a reverse side.

You can't have bad without good. You can't have right without wrong. You can't have fantastic without mundane. You need to experience all that to really earn the title of the film, 'Fantastic Four.'

For everything that you find dreadful, there's usually something that is rather marvelous as well.

We require, as a species, the difference between what is safe and unsafe to define ourselves. Be it in darkness or in light, where we are means nothing without the comparison to the other place - where we are not. And thus it is the difference between them that tells us who and what we are.

I'm fascinated by the yin and yang of everything.

Beauty is only about relationships. Nothing is beautiful on its own.

I think there's a yin and a yang to everything.

If you take the yin-yang, it has a piece of the other inside itself. You can't be too much of one thing and be balanced.