Paul Auster Quotes

Where ever I am I always find myself looking out the window wishing I was somewhere else.

There are times when you wish you were somewhere else, and someone else.

There's always this thing of wanting to be elsewhere.

When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd even bothered.

The worst feeling in the world is the homesickness that comes over a man occasionally when he is at home.

Is the modern social pattern of unending change and movement the cause of two modern diseases, insecurity and dissatisfaction? How lucky Thomas Hood was to be able to write, 'I remember, I remember the house where I was born.' I don't even know what mine looked like!

There was always something missing in Montreal.

That is the worst moment, when you feel you have lost / The desires for all that was most desirable, / Before you are contented with what you can desire; / Before you know what is left to be desired; / And you go on wishing that you could desire / What desire has left behind.

I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.

I missed you even when I was with you. That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.

The moon, too, abases her subjects, but in the daytime she is ridiculous. Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity, white and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide. No day is safe from news of you, walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

The discontented believe that their regrets are about the past.

The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent; a sort of love without a beloved, the ache we feel in a member we no longer have.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time.

I've always had this deep and chronic sense of dissatisfaction.

I always say I was born too late in the world, too old.

Many women long for what eludes them, and like not what is offered them.

I feel like I was born in the wrong time.

Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.

So much of my intention with songs is to voice a continual dissatisfaction, or at least to claw my way out of it.

You can certainly get an idea of the value of memory if your memories can carry you out into the world no matter how utterly dissatisfied you may be with the present and wish you could get away from it.

South Bend is a nice town, but you know that phrase - 'I was homesick even when I was home.'

I never want to be satisfied.

I am very happy with my life, but seven or eight months a year, I am away from home. I want to go home - that's the truth.

I don't make any secret of it - I hate not playing.