INVISIBLE by Paul Auster

Paul Auster's fifteenth novel Invisible opens in New York City in the spring of 1967 when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Professor Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life. 
Three different narrators tell the story of Invisible, a novel that travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from Morningside Heights, to the Left Bank of Paris, to a remote island in the Caribbean. It is a book of youthful rage, unbridled sexual hunger, and a relentless quest for justice.  Invisible sounds exactly like someone talking to you about something astonishing that happened to him when he was young. It is impossible not to listen.

INVISIBLE -BEST QUOTES
"Why do you say want? If you're already doing it, then it's not about the future. It already exists in the present"

"There is much to be explored in this hesitation, I believe, for it seems to suggest that I already understood that I would do well to keep my distance... that allowing myself to get involved with him could possibly lead to trouble. How did I know this?"

"Wary as I might have been, I was also fascinated by this peculiar, unreadable person, and the fact that he seemed genuinely glad to have stumbled into me stoked the fired of my vanity-- that invisible cauldron of self-regard and ambition that simmers and burns in each one of us. Whatever reservations I had about him, whatever doubts I harbored about his dubious character, I couldnt stop myself from wanting him to like me, to think that I was something more than a plodding,   run-of-the-mill   American undergraduate, to see the promise I hoped I had in me but which I doubted nine out of every ten minutes of my waking life."


"She believes you're too good for this world, and because of that, the world will eventually crush you."

"...And she was growing bored with herself. She shrugged when she said that, and when I saw the distant expression on her face, I had the terrible intuition that she already considered herself to be half dead."

"If it feels good, it's good, Margot said at one point, and that was the gift she gave me over the course of those five nights. She taught me not to be afraid of myself anymore"

"I pushed on with it for another year, and then, after a bitter anguished debate with myself, I concluded that I wasn't making sufficient progress and stopped. It's not that I thought my work was bad. There were occasional sparks, a few poems that seemed to have something fresh and urgent about them, lines I felt genuinely proud of, but by and large the results were mediocre, and the prospect of living out my life as a mediocrity frightened me into quitting"

"Fear is what drives us to take risks and extend ourselves beyond our normal limits, and any writer who feels he is standing on safe ground is unlikely to produce anything of value."

"...And when you finally went off to college yourself, you felt as if you had broken out of prison. It's not that you pride yourself for feeling the way you do-- in fact, you are revolted by it, appaled by your coldness and lack of compassion-- and you constantly berate yourself for accepting money from your father, who supports you and pays your tuition, but you need to be in college in order to stay away from him and your mother, and since you have no money of your own, and since your father earns too much for you to qualify for a scholarship, what choice do you have but to wallow in the ignominy of your two-faced position? So you run, and as you run you know you are running for your life, and unless you maintain the distance between you and your parents, you will begin to wither and die."

"You don't want to think about it. You have run away now, and you don't have the heart to return to that house of screams and silences, to listen to your mother howling in the bedroom upstairs, to reopen the medicine cabinet and count the bottles of tranquilizers and antidepressants, to think about the doctors and the breakdowns..."

"...You readily obliged her, since it always made her laugh, and nothing made you happier than to see your sister laugh."

"Neither one of you thought twice about going to the other when these miracles occurred. Life-altering events demanded a witness, and what better person to serve that role than one of you?"

"They are still Mom and Dad when you are with them, but Marge and Bud when you and your sister are alone. A slight affectation, perhaps, but it helps to separate them from you  in your mind, to create an illusion of distance, and that is what you need, you tell yourself, that is what you need more than anything else... But everytime I set foot in that house, I feel I'm being sucked back into the past."

"We were crazy back then, weren't we? Both of us-- each one as crazy as the other. And no one ever guessed. They all thought we were successful, well-adjusted kids, People looked up to us, we were envied, and deep down we were both nuts."

"She likes to dance, and you don't. She laughs more than you do and smokes less. She is a freer, happier person than you are, and whenever you are with her, the world seems brighter and more welcoming, a place where your sullen, introverted self can almost begin to feel at home."

"Can a single momentary lapse of courage have damaged your belief in yourself so badly that you no longer have faith in your future? Just months ago you were going to set the world on fire with your brilliance, and now you think of yourself as stupid and inept, a moronic masturbation machine trapped in the dead air of an odious job, a nobody. She is the only person you can talk to, the only person who makes you feel alive. And yet, happy as you are to be with her again, you know that you mustn't overburden her with your troubles, that you can't expect her to transform herself into the divine surgeon who will cut open your chest and mend your ailing heart. You must help yourself. If something inside you is broken, you must put it back together with your own two hands."

"...You love to look at her, that you adore every centimeter of her vibrant, luminous skin, and that beyond the overtly feminine places all men think about, you worship her elbows and knees, her wrists and ankles, the backs of her hands and her long, thin fingers, and that you are both mystified and enchanted by how a body as delicate as hers can also be as strong as it is, that she is both a swan and a tiger, a mythological being."

"You see your father observing you with that distant, shut-down look in his eyes, and you know he doesn't have the first idea what to make of you, that you have always been a mystery to your father, a person beyond understanding, but now, for once in your life, you find yourself in accord with him, for the truth of the matter is that you, too, have no idea what to make of yourself, and yes, even to yourself, you are a person beyond understanding."

"I try not to feel bitter about it, but sometimes I can't help myself. Life is shit, I know, but the only thing I want is more life, more years on this godforsaken earth."

"I felt that as long as I held the letter in my hand, as long as the words of that letter were still before my eyes, it would be as if he had resurrected, as if he had been momentarily brought back to life in the words he had written to me."

"This is the kind of room poets are supposed to work in, the kind of room that threatens to break your spirit and forces you into constant battle with yourself."

"He has consumed the rest of the daylight hours by walking aimlessly around the city, browsing in bookstores, reading on park benches, alive to the world around him but not yet immersed in it, still feeling his way, not unhappy, no, but wilting a little from the constant solitude."

"He wonders if words aren't an essential element of sex, if talking isn't finally a more subtle form of touching, and if the images dancing in our heads aren't just as important as the bodies we hold in our arms."

"You can find yourself drowning in a sea of trouble, and hard work can become the raft that ends up keeing you afloat."

"...Isn't it intriguing that thought cannot exist without language, and since language is a function of the brain, we would have to say that language--the ability to experience the world through symbols-- is in some sense a physical property of human beings, which probes that the old mind-body duality is so much nonsense, doesn't it? Adieu, Descartes. The mind and the body are one."

"Unbidden, a forgotten verse from Ecclesiastes comes roaring into his consciousness. And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly... As he jots down the words in the right-hand margin of his poem, he wonders if this isn't the truest thing he has written about himself in months. The words might not be his own, but he feels that they belong to him."

"Mental telepathy is the best indication of a strong bond between people."

"(never nothing but the dream of nothing / never anything but the dream of all)""Why don't you ever mention these things to me? That's what friends are for. To share each other's pains, to help each other out.
           It's too hard, she says, lowering her eyes and looking at her hands she speaks. That's why I'm so happy when I'm with you. Because I don't have to think about those things, because I can forget how rotten and terrible the world is..."

"I know she's high strung, I know she isn't terribly stable, but she's also a remarkable person, and my feeling is that she's a lot stronger than you think she is."

"I have already mentioned how beautiful she was, but saying that doesn't do justice to the overwhelming impact she had on me. Gwyn was ablaze with beauty, an incandescent being, a storm in the heart of every man who laid eyes on her, and seeing her for the first time ranks as one of the most astonishing moments of life."

"She had known him for only a couple of weeks in the distant days of her girlhood, and yet their friendship must have opened up something in her that altered her perception of herself, that thrust her for the first time into a direct confrontation with the depths of her own heart. I have never forgotten him. He was the first love of my life."