Paul Auster Quotes About Solitude

Quotes about: Solitude

• Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude

  Paul Auster

  Book, Men, Years

  Paul Auster (2011). “Collected Prose”, p.188, Faber & Faber

• Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is intractable, here all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But whether one can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirely

  Paul Auster

  Men, Solitude, Matter

• There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. […] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself.

  Paul Auster

  Men, Decision, Solitude

• Don't be a writer, it's a terrible way to live your life, there's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it.

  Paul Auster

  Mean, Live Your Life, Solitude

  "Big Think Interview With Paul Auster". Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 5, 2009.

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