Paul Auster Quotes

Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life ... They could be mine, they might be yours.

Yeah, well my name is Bai Ling. That means white spirit, and I really feel like sometimes I'm not existing.

I probably still haven’t completely adapted to the world. I don’t know, I feel like this isn’t the real world. The people, the scene: they just don’t seem real to me.

It's kind of like when you look at yourself in the mirror and you say your name. And it gets to a point where none of it seems real.

Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination.

Sometimes I wonder where I am from. I am either way ahead or I come from another world. I don't recognise this world.

Real life? Well, I just hope mine isn't investigated. They might find that I don't really exist - that I'm just a hologram.

Nobody knows me.

When someone is looking at me, I feel they are looking at someone standing behind me, not at me.

I don't associate myself with anything. I don't associate myself with where I'm from or where I am.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.

Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.

The most agonising thing is to drop doubt into a man about his being a reality, three-dimensional - and not some other kind of reality.

I’m me, and at the same time not me. That’s what it felt like. A very still, quiet feeling.

The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question.... He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.

I couldn't say who I am, I haven't the remotest notion of myself; I am someone without antecedents, without a history, without a country, and on that I insist!

You described the feeling you’d always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn’t worry quite so much about why.

Hey, what is it with you? Why are you so spaced out? You still haven't answered me." I probably still haven't completely adapted to the world," I said after giving it some thought. "I don't know, I feel like this isn't the real world. The people, the scene: they just don't seem real to me." Midori rested an elbow on the bar and looked at me. "There was something like that in a Jim Morrison song, I'm pretty sure." People are strange when you're a stranger.

We live on top of the created world, I think to myself, not in it.

I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.

I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.

I came alone and I go as a stranger. I do not know who I am, nor what I have been doing.

There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me.

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.