The New York Trilogy Quotes
"New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps."
"To practice a form of divination by reading the sidewalks."
"Motion was of the essence, the act of putting one foot in front of the other."
"Every day, rain or shine, he would leave his apartment to walk through the city."
"It was night. Quinn lay in bed smoking a cigarette, listening to the rain beat against the window."
"The world was outside of him, around him, before him."
"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."
"New York was the nowhere he had built around himself."
"For our words no longer correspond to the world."
"Every object is similar to the umbrella, in that it serves a function."
"Anything for the truth. No sacrifice is too great."
"Memory is a great blessing, Peter. The next best thing to death."
"To what extent would people tolerate blasphemies if they gave them amusement?"
"The way up and the way down are one and the same."
"He could forget about the case, get back to his routine, write another book."
"You’re getting old, you’re turning into an old fart."
"As long as you tell people what you are going to do, it doesn’t matter. Then you are free to do what you want."
"The busy signal had become a counterpoint to his steps, a metronome beating steadily inside the random noises of the city."
"Perhaps that is a place where one could finally disappear."
"The greatest danger, therefore, was in eating too much."
"Words are transparent for him, great windows that stand between him and the world."
"He finds that his words had been severed from him, that now they were a part of the world at large."
"For knowledge comes slowly, and when it comes, it is often at great personal expense."
"It’s all part of it, he thinks, embarrassed at himself for being like this. That’s what happens when you have no one to talk to."
"There is something nice about being in the dark, he discovers, something thrilling about not knowing what is going to happen next."
"Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us."
"Death is something that happens to us every day."
"The facts seemed to speak for themselves: Fanshawe was probably dead; it was pointless to think he would be coming back."
"In spite of himself, caught unawares by this image, Blue feels compassion rising up in him."
"By the time he finishes, dawn has come, and the room has begun to brighten."
"I myself prefer to think that he went far away, boarding a train that morning and going out West to start a new life."
"It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day."
"For now is the moment that Blue stands up from his chair, puts on his hat, and walks through the door. And from this moment on, we know nothing."
"In spite of this letter, I want you to go on thinking of me as dead."
"I made certain decisions that were necessary, and though people have suffered, leaving was the best and kindest thing I have ever done."
"To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books—this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one’s life becomes very small."
"By belonging to Sophie, I began to feel as though I belonged to everyone else as well."
"We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure."
"Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out."
"Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling."
"We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young."
"Just because a door doesn’t open when you knock on it doesn’t mean that nobody’s there. You’ve got to use your imagination, my friend."
"The job became considerably easier after that, but it was no longer the same job."
"Every day or two, I stopped by the office to pick up a new batch of forms and turn in the ones I had finished."
"I don’t know how many people I invented—but there must have been hundreds of them, perhaps thousands."
"Most of all, there was the pleasure of making up names."
"It was a childish thing to be doing, but I had no qualms."
"It gave me pleasure to pluck names out of thin air, to invent lives that had never existed, that never would exist."
"A man lives and then he dies, and what happens in between makes no sense."
"Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for."
"Each life is irreducible to anything other than itself."
"Think of what happens. Think of how lives burst apart."
"The story is not in the words; it’s in the struggle."
"Leave me alone," he said, showing anger for the first time. "I don’t talk to lunatics. Leave me alone, or there’ll be trouble."
"It is important to stress that by now I was completely lucid—no wobbling, no drunkenness, utterly clear in my head."
"I was the thing we all fear most: the belligerent stranger who steps out from the shadows, the knife that stabs us in the back, the speeding car that crushes us to death."
"The sensation of life had dribbled out of me, and in its place there was a miraculous euphoria, a sweet poison rushing through my blood, the undeniable odor of nothingness."
"This is the moment of my death, I said to myself, this is when I die."
"It felt strange to be alive, almost incomprehensible."
"Our strength was in our silence, and I had no intention of breaking it."
"For when anything can happen—that is the precise moment when words begin to fail."
"I learned to live with him in the same way I lived with the thought of my own death."
"Once it happens, it goes on happening; you live with it for the rest of your life."
"To the degree that Fanshawe became inevitable, that was the degree to which he was no longer there."
"Because you’re the emperor. An emperor can get anything he wants."
"I’ve lived with it for so long now, it’s the only thing I have left."
"Each sentence erased the sentence before it, each paragraph made the next paragraph impossible."