City of Glass: Quotes

In brief

A themed selection of verified lines from City of Glass, grouped under chance, identity, the red notebook, New York, and Stillman's language theory. Each quotation is short and attributed, with commentary explaining what it shows about the novel's method rather than standing in for reading it.

About this selection

The lines below are Auster's own sentences, not summary or paraphrase. Each one is short and drawn from the 1985 text, and they are grouped by theme rather than by the order they appear in the book. The groups follow the ideas that hold the novel together: chance, names, the notebook, the city, and the collapse of language under Stillman's private theory. Commentary follows each line to explain what it does inside the book, not to stand in for reading it.

Chance and the wrong number

The book opens on an accident and never corrects course. A misdialled call reaches Quinn instead of the detective agency it was meant for, and he treats the mistake as an assignment and answers.

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.Paul Auster, City of Glass, 1985

Quinn is asked for by a name that is not his, three separate times, and three times he could have corrected the caller. He does not. Nothing in the plot that follows has a cause beyond that refusal, a point the narrator states outright a few pages later.

Much later he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later.Paul Auster, City of Glass, 1985

Notice the delay built into the sentence. The conclusion arrives after the events it explains, and that lag is the shape of the whole book: understanding trails the action, and by the time it catches up the case is already lost.

Identity and names

Quinn already writes under a borrowed name before the case starts. His detective novels appear under "William Wilson," and his detective hero is called Max Work. The Stillman case adds a further layer once Quinn takes the name Paul Auster to get in the door.

My name is Peter Stillman. That is not my real name. My real name is Mr Sad.Paul Auster, City of Glass, 1985

Stillman's son introduces himself this way at their first meeting, and the line does two jobs at once. It tells Quinn who he is about to work for, and it tells the reader that "real name" is not fixed in this book. Everyone in the room is using a name taken from somewhere else. For the full cast of borrowed and doubled names, see the characters page.

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, City of Glass, 1985

Before the case, walking already served Quinn as a way to stop being anyone in particular. That habit explains why he takes the Stillman job so readily. Becoming "Paul Auster" is not a new kind of dissolving. It is a sharper version of one he practised on his own, alone, long before the phone rang.

Writing and the notebook

Quinn's red notebook holds his surveillance record of Stillman senior. By the book's own account, it ends up holding the only record of Quinn.

As for Quinn, it is impossible for me to say where he is now. I have followed the red notebook as closely as I could.Paul Auster, City of Glass, 1985

These are the narrator's words, spoken from outside the story he has been telling, and they mark the point where the book admits its own limit. The notebook is not evidence gathered about Quinn. It becomes what stands in for him once the account of him runs out. For what that limit means for the ending, see the ending explained page.

New York

The city here is not backdrop. It is the material the case is built from, the actual streets Quinn's feet trace into letters Stillman is spelling out without telling him.

New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, it always left him with the feeling of being lost.Paul Auster, City of Glass, 1985

The claim matters because it is offered as fact about the city, not only as a note on Quinn's state of mind. Auster keeps both readings open at once. New York is a maze, and Quinn is lost in himself, and the sentence refuses to separate the two.

I have come to New York because it is the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal.Paul Auster, City of Glass, 1985

Spoken inside the story rather than by the narrator, this is a judgement about the city offered as a reason to live in it. The wreckage is treated as the draw, not the problem, which says something about why the cast keeps walking through the city rather than out of it.

Language and Stillman's experiment

Stillman senior's project gives the book its title. He believes English broke when it left Eden, and he means to rebuild it from nothing, one object at a time. The theory is worked through at length on the themes page.

Adam's one task in the Garden had been to invent language, to give each creature and thing its name.Paul Auster, City of Glass, 1985

The claim behind Stillman's whole method sits inside that one sentence. If naming once made a thing and its name identical, a broken world is a world where the names came loose, and Stillman treats his project as a repair job rather than an invention of his own.

Humpty Dumpty: the purest embodiment of the human condition. What is an egg? It is that which has not yet been born.Paul Auster, City of Glass, 1985

Stillman offers this reading of the Carroll character as proof that a word can be forced to mean whatever its speaker decides. It is the clearest statement in the book of the belief Quinn's whole case is built to test, and the test fails. Stillman's new language is never published, and the case built to track him produces no solution a detective novel would recognise.

For the plot these lines sit inside, chapter by chapter, see the City of Glass page.