Paul Auster Quotes

Human life moves only in one direction - toward disease, damage, and death. The best you can hope for is to remain stagnant or, in certain cases, return to a previous condition when things weren't as bad as they've become for you.

Without health life is not life; it is only a state of languor and suffering an image of death.

Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life.

Life is an incurable disease.

Man is born in a day, and he dies in a day, and the thing is easily over; but to have a sick heart for three-fourths of one's lifetime is simply to have death renewed every morning; and life at that price is not worth living.

My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them.

Love and death are the two great hinges on which all human sympathies turn.

A man begins dying at the moment of his birth. Most People live in denial of Death's patient courtship until, late in life and deep in sickness, they become aware of him sitting bedside.

I that in heill wes and gladnes Am trublit now with gret seiknes And feblit with infermite: Timor Mortis conturbat me.* * Fear of Death troubles me.

I'd felt that a man without a woman was like a neck without a pain.

And in bed, deep inside the building, are all the headaches that won't go away. The failed kidneys, the rashes, the ragged-edged moles, the lumps on the breast, the coughs that have turned nasty. In the Marie Curie Ward on the fourth floor are the kids with cancer. Their bodies secretly and slowly being consumed. And then there's the mortuary, where the dead lie in refrigerated drawers with name tags on their feet.

You know, there's that silly saying 'We're born alone and we die alone' -it's nonsense. We're surrounded at birth and surrounded at death. It is in between that we're alone.

For the world, I count it not an inn, but a hospital; and a place not to live, but to die in.

In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies.

Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.

I've been an important star and lived a full life, yet I only hve three close friends. I guess that's all anyone can expect.

Cancer is something that, tragically, affects almost all of our lives.

Whatever hardships there have been in my life I still live in a very privileged position. Fear is not knowing where your next meal is coming from. Fear is seeing a child get hurt. Fear is watching someone you love waste away. Fear is knowing you are going to die yourself. But there's no fear in what I do. I write books.

I like being alone and I think this movie, as much as it is an investigation of connection and people bonding, I also think it's just as much about loneliness.

For death is not the worst, but when one wants to die and is not able even to have that.

I really wanted to die at certain periods in my life.

I don't want to be alone my whole life. It is much more fun to share what you have than to have it to yourself. And it isn't like I don't have love in my life. I have a lot of friends who love me and who I love.

He who loves 50 people has 50 woes; he who loves no one has no woes.