Paul Auster Quotes About Eyes

Quotes about: Eyes

• We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

  Paul Auster

  Eye, Who We Are, Aliens

  Paul Auster (2012). “Winter Journal”, p.101, Faber & Faber

• Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within...By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.

  Paul Auster

  Eye, Thinking, Wandering Aimlessly

• People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you're going to see just about all that you can handle.

  Paul Auster

  Eye, Thinking, People

• There is a double rhythm in all human beings. We are binary beings - two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears. Two legs for walking. And the heartbeat thumping in our chest mirrors that.

  Paul Auster

  Heart, Eye, Mirrors

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy, Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

• Even you, who’ve lived inside your body for 64 years, would apparently be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to think of your ear or one of your eyes or elbow, also familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

  Paul Auster

  Taken, Eye, Thinking

• Most of the boys would come with bits of equipment that their fathers had given them from their war days - helmets, canteens, binoculars, these kinds of things - that leant a kind of authenticity to the games we were playing. But, of course, my father never gave me anything. So I began to question him. You know, Why don't you have anything from the war? And I think he was...embarrassed to tell me he hadn't fought, because, you know, little boys want to turn their fathers into heroes, and he didn't want to be diminished in my eyes.

  Paul Auster

  Father, War, Hero

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

• A canteen I remember vividly, and maybe one other thing, I can't remember. And I knew then that he had bought them in an army surplus store that day and he wanted to maybe enhance himself in my eyes, and say, "Well, yes, I have been in the army." Or [he] simply just didn't want to disappoint me. It could have been one or the other. But I knew that he had lied to me. And this filled me with a tremendous sort of anger towards him. At the same time, knowing he was trying to please me, so feeling good about him.

  Paul Auster

  Eye, Army, Please Me

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

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