2024-05-03 00:30:39
A deep sadness hits readers today, those lovers of literature who have The New York Trilogy, City of Glass or 4 3 2 1 in their library. The author of these famous works, Paul Auster, died on Tuesday, April 30 at the age of 77. As reported by The New York Times, it was her friend Jacki Lyden who confirmed the news. Upon learning what happened, his fans paid tribute to him on social networks and shared the best phrases from his literature, those that will remain on the pages and in memory forever.
The American writer died at the age of 77 at his residence in Brooklyn, New York, as a result of a series of complications from lung cancer that he had been treating for a year. He even completed his last novel, Baumgartner (Seix Barral), during the oncological treatment he underwent.
Quickly, his readers echoed this sad news and fired him on the networks. And he knew how to be one of those authors with his own, unique style, which made him, when a person entered a bookstore, redirect their gaze to one of his works. Below are some remembered phrases from his books.
•“A book will not end war nor will it be able to feed a hundred people, but it can feed minds and, sometimes, change them.”
•“Not a scientific truth, perhaps, not a verifiable truth, but an emotional truth, which in the long run is the only thing that counts.”
•“Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.”
•“Death is not the only true arbiter of happiness, but rather it is the only measure by which we can judge life itself.”
•“The best friendships, the most lasting, are based on admiration.”
•“He who trusts idiots ends up behaving like an idiot.”
•“The fear of death, which is probably no different from saying: fear of living.”
•“If justice exists, it has to be for everyone; “No one can be excluded, otherwise it would no longer be justice.”
•“We desperately need to be told stories. As much as eating, because they help us organize reality and illuminate the chaos of our lives.”
•“There is probably no greater human achievement than to deserve love in the end” (Winter Diary)
•“I believe that there are decisions that should never be forced to make, choices that leave too great a burden on the conscience” (The country of last things).
•“I had jumped from the edge and then, at the last moment, something caught me in the air. That something is what I define as love” (The Palace of the Moon).
•“Reading was my escape valve, my relief and my consolation, my favorite stimulant: reading for pure pleasure, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when an author’s words resonate in your head” (Brooklyn Follies).
Users fired Paul Auster on the networks
In Another user, meanwhile, shared a fragment of Winter Diary, which was widely replicated: “You think that it will never happen to you, it is impossible for it to happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom those things will never happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, just as they happen to anyone else.”
“Paul Auster died. He wrote, among other things, The Invention of Solitude”; “Paul Auster died. I remember the beginning of The Invention of Solitude,” commented other users. And the aforementioned novel, published in 1982, was one of the most cited. “(…) We can accept with resignation the death that occurs after a long illness, and even accidental death we can attribute to fate; but when a man dies without apparent cause, when a man dies simply because he is a man, we are brought so close to the invisible border between life and death that we do not know which side we are on. Life becomes death, and it is as if death had been the owner of life throughout its existence.”
On the other hand, the specialized X account Literland shared some of Auster’s best phrases, including: “Our hearts know what is in them, even if our mouths remain silent.” Furthermore, they remembered him with one of his most famous sentences from Winter Diary: “There is probably no greater human achievement than to deserve love in the end.”
Other fans also wanted to pay tribute to the author of The Palace of the Moon, fragments such as: “(…)I had jumped from the edge and then, at the last moment, something caught me in the air. That something is what I define as love. It is the only thing that can stop a man’s fall, the only thing powerful enough to override the laws of gravity. Another chosen passage from this book was: “I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth and in that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn it; When you do, you will never be the same again. I was 17. I’m talking about freedom, Fogg.”
