Jonathan Lethem

Except science now tells us that luck is there whether you acknowledge it or not. And I'm afraid in your case I see the signs of a history of bad luck. Not even a latency so much as a full-blown case going completely ignored for lack of context.

Memory is a rehearsal for a show that never goes on.

A superhero spliced criminals from victims. In Gowanus things tended to be more mixed up.

We were in a middle space then, in a cone of white, father and son moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream.

Yeah, maybe you look a little less familiar yourself.

Everyone's body betrayed them in different ways, it was all forgiven and never discussed.

The cars rushing below knew nothing. People in cars weren't New Yorkers anyway, they'd suffered some basic misunderstanding. The two boys on the walkway, apparently standing still they were moving faster than the cars.
Nineteen seventy-five.

Sometimes it’s better not to think in questions, but I can’t seem to get out of the habit.

You can't be deep without a surface.

His imprecision and laziness maddened my compulsive instincts — his patchiness, the way even his speech was riddled with drop-outs and glitches like a worn cassette, the way his leaden senses refused the world

The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism.

Listen to me. I’m shy. I’m not stupid. I can’t meet people’s eyes. I don’t know if you understand what that’s like. There’s a whole world going on around me, I’m aware of that. It’s not because I don’t want to look at you, Lucinda. It’s that I don’t want to be seen.

Terms swarm up to tempt me in the course of this description: Greek Orthodox, Romanesque, flying buttress, etc. These guessing words I find junked in my brain in deranged juxtaposition, like files randomly stuffed into cabinets by a dispirited secretary with no notion of what, if anything, might ever be usefully retrieved. Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I’m helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don’t. Yet I go around forming sentences.

Basically every two-bit libertarian, free-range asshole you'll ever meet is just waiting for someone to talk them in default cop.

Television had elected itself, I figured. It could watch itself too, for all I cared. I read my book.