Paul Auster Quotes

Repetition is based on body rhythms, so we identify with the heartbeat, or with walking, or with breathing.

The idea of the split personality is as old as Genesis. For a start, Eve was manufactured from Adam's rib. Then there's Cain and Abel, twins at war. They were followed by Esau and Jacob, likewise divisible into hairy and smooth types.

Just as we have two eyes and two feet, duality is part of life.

The planet is always half light and half dark, and so are we.

In the midst of the fountain of wit there arises something bitter, which stings in the very flowers.

I learned quite early on in life that we are all two people. And one of those people none of us will ever know.

The heart jungle drum beat finds its voice in love and matchsticks.

Everyone on the planet has a dark and a light. That's a multi-dimensional character.

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

There are two words for everything.

I always loved playing extreme opposites, whether it's internal or external.

We were built to be rhythmic.

I believe we are all dual beings. Some cultures actually believe we have two souls.

...music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We're walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn't get to any other way.

The body cannot be the soul.

True observers of nature, although they may think differently, will still agree that everything that is, everything that is observable as a phenomenon, can only exhibit itself in one of two ways. It is either a primal polarity that is able to unify, or it is a primal unity that is able to divide. The operation of nature consists of splitting the united or uniting the divided; this is the eternal movement of systole and diastole of the heartbeat, the inhalation and exhalation of the world in which we live, act, and exist.

Come around, feel the sound. Know you make my heart pound. Fill me up, bring me down; when I hear your sound.

Live, be, move, rejoice -- you are alive! Without the heart's wise rhythm, we could not exist.

Momentum was momentum, whether you found it in music or on the street or in the beat of your own heart.

One of the reasons I believe in jazz is that the oneness of man can come through the rhythm of your heart. It’s the same anyplace in the world, that heartbeat. It’s the first thing you hear when you’re born — or before you’re born — and it’s the last thing you hear.

Marya Morevna, we are better at this than you are. We can hold two terrible ideas at once in our hearts. Never have your folk delighted us more, been more like family. For a devil, hypocrisy is a parlour game, like charades. Such fun, and when the evening is done we shall be holding our bellies to keep from dying of laughter.

We are the ones who take this thing called music and line it up with this thing called time. We are the ticking, we are the pulsing, we are underneath every part of this moment. And by making the moment our own, we are rendering it timeless. There is no audience. There are no instruments. There are only bodies and thoughts and murmurs and looks. It's the concert rush to end all concert rushes, because this is what matters. When the heart races, this is what it's racing towards.

I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!

The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.

There are no greater adversaries than yin and yang, because nothing in Heaven or on Earth escapes them. But it is not yin and yang that do this, it is your heart that makes it so.