Yair’s Reviews > The Invention of Solitude > Status Update

“The word of the Lord came unto Jonah … saying, Arise, go to Ninevah, that great city, and cry against it….”

Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude (p. 157). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"And it is true that one must make a distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory, as Proust does during the course of his long novel about the past."

Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude (p. 138). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

That, too, is how A. would like to remember him: sitting in that chair and making everyone laugh.

Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude (p. 119). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"The modern nothingness. Interlude on the force of parallel lives."

Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude (p. 107). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The afflictions that Oedipus bore seem like this, as when a poor man complains there is something he lacks. Son of Laios, poor stranger in Greece! Life is death, and death is a kind of life.”

Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude (p. 99). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"There was nothing in his attitude that was either faint-hearted or pious, nothing to suggest a hermit’s renunciation. He embraced his condition with passion and joyful enthusiasm, and as A. looks back on it now, he realizes that he has never known anyone who laughed so hard and so often."

Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude (p. 89). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"He’s my brother, he would say, as if that explained everything. Brotherhood was the first principle, the unassailable postulate, the one and only article of faith. Like belief in God, to question it was heresy."

Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude (pp. 49-50). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

‘As long as Harry lived,’ she said to one of them, ‘I was worried. I never knew real happiness. Now I regret that he had to die by my hand. I am as happy now as I ever expect to be….’

Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude (p. 47). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"Perhaps this is what really counts: to arrive at the core of human feeling, in spite of the evidence."

Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude (p. 26). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: they have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. They are there and yet not there: tangible ghosts, condemned to survive in a world they no longer belong to."

Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude (p. 8).