Paul Auster Quotes

In our memories, there is a graveyard where we bury our dead. They all lie there together, the loved ones and the ones we hated, friends and foes and kin, with no distinction among them. We have to mourn every one of them, because our memories have made them as much a part of us as our bones or our skin. If we don't, we've no right to remember anything at all.

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.

The only way to solace anyone who loved you in life is to be a good memory

When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.

I have a picture I keep in my wallet of my father's corpse... I keep that picture in my wallet to show people who show me baby pictures.

I like to think that when I fall, A rain-drop in Death's shoreless sea, This shelf of books along the wall, Beside my bed, will mourn for me.

The body is the one thing you have to say goodbye to. You can hold on to your memories. You can hold on to the spirit. That's part of the package that you love and the part that comforts you.

I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.

Mourn for me rather as living than as dead.

I admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.

Just because someone's dead doesn't mean it's over. My grandfather died more than 25 years ago, but I still think of him a lot and smell his smell.

Widow. The word consumes itself.

Death ends a life, not a relationship.

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

I miss all of my old friends who have passed away. Sometimes you just don't understand why they were taken so soon. I loved and miss Johnny Cash. I miss my old buddy Johnny Paycheck, who happens to be buried in an area of the cemetery that I bought for my family.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

When you lose someone, their memory lives on.

People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.

Even the death of Friends will inspire us as much as their lives. They will leave consolation to the mourners, as the rich leave money to defray the expenses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monuments of other men are overgrown with moss; for our Friends have no place in the graveyard.

Everyone I have lost in the closing of a door the click of the lock is not forgotten, they do not die but remain within the soft edges of the earth, the ash of house fires and cancer in sin and forgiveness huddled under old blankets dreaming their way into my hands, my heart closing tight like fists. - "Indian Boy Love Song #1

Sharing tales of those we've lost is how we keep from really losing them.

In death, lie. In living, cry. Carry me home to remember to be remembered.

At death our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us and are found out, or depart farther from us and are forgotten. Friends are as often brought nearer together as separated by death.

Nothing is stronger than the position of the dead among the living.