Paul Auster Quotes

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice.

The one thing I've tried to do is be insightful.

I'm the kind of person where I always digest everything around me.

I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.

In order to begin an analysis, there must already be a synthesis present in the mind.

If you read to me I could tell you everything that was read. They didn't know what it was. They knew I wasn't lazy, but what was it?

I observe a lot. I see a lot around me.

Mind is memory, not intelligence.

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.

This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in; those who have read of everything, are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind , and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections:;; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.

Observe, Remember, Compare.

We impose order and narrative on everything in order to understand it. Otherwise, there's nothing but chaos.

Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.

After you finish a book, the story still goes on in your mind. You can never change the beginning. But you can always change the end.

Consciousness is the foundation of all thinking; and thinking is the foundation of all consciousness.

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.

The modern mind always tends to reduce the greater to the lesser rather than seeing the lesser as reflecting the greater.

Amusement to an observing mind is study.

We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.

You don't know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.

When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.

He who walks may see and understand. You can study all America from one hilltop, if your eyes are open and your mind is willing to reach. But first you must walk to that hill.

Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph.