Paul Auster Quotes

There are always two forces warring against each other within us.

It is the power of memory that gives rise to the power of imagination.

People more easily tolerate opposition than a contradiction

Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape?

I always look for contradiction in a character.

As reason is a rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason.

In Psychology we deal with minds and their processes, and leave out of account as far as possible the objects that we get to know by means of them.

Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts.

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

Faith and reason overpower each other throughout one's life, which results in contradiction, but the conflict never ceases in any sphere.

Setting themselves against reason, as often as reason is against them.

Speech is the mirror of the mind.

Although every man believes that his decisions and resolutions involve the most multifarious factors, in reality they are mere oscillation between flight and longing.

Memory is a strange Bell—Jubilee, and Knell.

Even though it's hard, it's easy.

the wide discrepancy between reason and feeling may be unreal; it is not improbable that intellect is a high form of feeling - a specialized, intensive feeling about intuitions.

I think it would be just to say the most essential characteristic of mind is memory, using this word in its broadest sense to include every influence of past experience on present reactions.

The war existing between the senses and reason.

Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the labors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established.

For the span of my memory, this has been a city of opposing wills.

This can't be true but I remember it.

Mind is memory, not intelligence.

The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them.

Memory. My poison, my food.

The heart and the mind, what an enigma.