Paul Auster Quotes

…I hate myself for not being able to go downstairs naturally and seek comfort in numbers. I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me.

It is hard to forgive, and to look at those eyes, and feel those wasted hands,' he answered. 'Kiss me again; and don’t let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer—but yours! How can I?

Two voices struggled inside me. One that wanted to be good and brave, and one that told the good one to keep her mouth shut.

Sometimes I'm so deeply buried under self-reproaches that I long for a word of comfort to help me dig myself out again.

But he knew instinctively what he suggested was impossible. She'd been through so much, and held her tears back for so long, that Royce doubted that anything could force her to shed them.

I made promises to you that I'm not sure I can keep. None of it has anything to do with you. It's just that I don't know what to do now. You must be thinking what a rotten person I am. Well, believe me, I'm thinking the same thing. I don't know how this happened or why. Maybe I can get over it. Do you think you can wait - because I don't want you to stop loving me. I keep remembering us and how it was. I don't want to hurt you ... not ever.

I only have have one question, scraping the inside of me. Answer it, and I will stumble back into her shadow, shut my mouth, never ask again. I've tried to ignore it, but it won't go away. It haunts my dreams, chases me through every single day, and I don't have the strength to turn around, face it down. So please tell me and I swear I'll never ask again. It's in your power to make it go away, and all you have to do is tell me why you love her more.

I wanted to cry but I didn't, I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the room ending our suffering.

I don't need more pain in my life. Why did I invite it in? Do I have to feel pain to believe I feel anything at all?

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go".

A breath of steam trickles out, filled with the sobs of a grown woman breaking into girl-sized pieces.

Be sure to live up to your reputation for honesty and goodness, because many souls who believe you to be honest and good have placed themselves in your hands.

But the humans weren't what made my steps falter as I walked through grass that had turned bright green with summer's touch. It was Dimitri. Always Dimitri. Dimitri, the man I loved. Dimitri, the Strigoi I wanted to save. Dimitri, the monster I'd most likely have to kill. The love we'd shared always burned within me, no matter how often I told myself to move on, no matter how much the world did think I'd move on. He was always with me, always on my mind, always making me question myself.

Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being.

It's terrifying to see someone inside of whom a vital spring seems to have been broken. It's particularly terrifying to see him in your mirror.

All these people keep waxing sentimental about how fabulously well I am doing as a mother, how competent I am, but I feel inside like when you're first learning to put nail polish on your right hand with your left. You can do it, but it doesn't look all that great around the cuticles.

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.

The silence is perfect, and yet a torment.

I cannot choose to ignore this feeling, of life slowly bleeding out of me. I cannot ignore the fact that life only makes sense to me when I see a smile, or feel another hand in mine.

I was in a very dark place for a long time. It's just so hard to have normalcy.

I'm currently in the middle of a depression. I couldn't really tell you what set it off, but I think it stems from my cowardice, which confronts me at every turn.

If I cried me a river of all my confessions, would I drown in my shallow regret?

No matter what anyone says, it's much worse to be unloved than it is to be lost in the woods." "Sometimes, I think you've been lost in the woods all your life, Charlie Brown.

A woman who is starved for her real soul-life may look 'cleaned up and combed' on the outside, but on the inside she is filled with dozens of pleading hands and empty mouths.