The New York Trilogy Part III

'The entire story comes to what happened at the, and without that end inside me now, I could not have started this book. The same holds for the two books that come before it, City of Glass and Ghosts. These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about. [...] I am merely suggesting that a moment came when it no longer frightened me to look at what had happened. [...] The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle.

[...]

'What else did you do in New York?'
'I watched you. I watched you and Sophie and the baby. There was even a time when I camped outside your apartment building. For two or three weeks, maybe a month. I followed you everywhere you went. Once or twice, I even bumped into you on the street, looked you straight in the eye. But you never noticed. It was fantastic the way you didn't see me.'

[...]

'I came to the last page just as the train was pulling out.'

(Paul Auster, The Locked Room)