Yair’s Reviews > Leviathan > Status Update

"He had caused a disturbance somewhere deep inside the earth, and the waves were now beginning to rise to the surface, touching every part of the ground at once.

Something had happened, something new was in the air, and there were days that spring when I walked through the city and almost imagined that I could feel the sidewalks vibrating under my feet."

Auster, Paul. Leviathan (p. 245).

"It became his private religion, his form of daily prayer. Scan the newspapers and hold your breath. Make sure they weren’t after you. Make sure you could go on living another twenty-four hours."

Auster, Paul. Leviathan (p. 227). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"He had been in California for just over a day, and already his bridges were burning behind him."

Auster, Paul. Leviathan (p. 219). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"Beyond reading the papers and watching the television news, he did almost nothing. He slept. He stared out the window. He thought about the immensity of fear."

Auster, Paul. Leviathan (p. 188). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"It was only later that it hit him—long after he was back on the road. Driving down to New York that night, he suddenly understood that these were the materials for constructing a bomb."

Auster, Paul. Leviathan (p. 176). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

“You’re confusing thoughts with deeds,” I said. “There’s a world of difference between doing something and just thinking about it. If we didn’t make that distinction, life would be impossible.”

Auster, Paul. Leviathan (p. 128). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

“Grant stood by me when I was crazy. I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other always.”

Auster, Paul. Leviathan (p. 115). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"As Sachs put it the first time he came to visit me, it was a sanctuary of inwardness, a room in which the only possible activity was thought."

An American Kafka but that feels reductive, there's a drive and a dynamism, off-set not at all by Auster's master rendering of the brooding nihilism and anxious mindset of the postwar postBoom American dread. All cooly done, the sentiments left bare, it works.

"Almost like a child, I sometimes thought, like a prodigious child playing with his toys."

Auster, Paul. Leviathan (p. 55). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"No one can say where a book comes from, least of all the person who writes it. Books are born out of ignorance, and if they go on living after they are written, it’s only to the degree that they cannot be understood."

Auster, Paul. Leviathan (p. 40). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.