Jonathan Lethem Quotes

His recording career spans just a decade: Rude was silenced by drug abuse and domestic tragedy at the end of the '70s.

They were drones, men costumed in independent thought who'd become slaves of party groupspeak. (p. 4)

“OK, so he’s a producer, right?” Lucius spoke as a prosecuting attorney, nailing down established facts. “The thing about producers is that they are producing something, usually several things at once.”
“He’s a liar,” said Jane.
“Same thing,” said Lucius.

THE OLD GROWTH, THE MAPLES, turned first. They rusted one leaf at a time, where ocean breezes bruised them, late in August. Paulo, the tree warden, once told Journeyman that the first trees to change reveal a map of damage. The earliest turning were those once sickened or lightning-struck. So Journeyman saw the season as a theater of succumbing. The wind’s bite called each tree to solidarity with the weakest. Only the evergreens were refuseniks. Primordial trees, dinosaur trees — in their gummy hearts, they were deader than the trees that turned.

Thing is, for me a woman has to have a certain amount of muffling, you know what I mean? Something between you, in the way of insulation. Otherwise, you're right up against her naked soul.

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

I suppose there was never a reason for tearing down a cabin or scrapping a stopped automobile, if you had all those acres.

What better way to keep people under your thumb? Make up some big enemy, justify everything as part of the war effort.

"Laughing at "Rapper's Delight"'s no revenge, and anyway it wasn't your idea, and anyway it's funny. Dean Street's another story, a realm of knowledge unapplicable here.
You've just about finished leaving Dean Street, and Aeroman, behind.
If this means avoiding the one who protected your ass all through junior high, the one you once ached to emulate, the one whose orbit you were happy just to swing in - if it means leaving the million-dollar kid's regular phone messages in Abraham's precise handwriting unreturned - that's a small price to pay for growing up, isn't it?
This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no foolin' around.
It's the end, the end of the seventies."

Mai infrangere le illusioni degli altri se non si è certi di poter offrir loro un'alternativa migliore di quella a cui li si vuole strappare.

You could harbor a man in your bed or your body, play on his nervous system like Paderewski at the keyboard, and not shift his brain one inch out of the concrete of dogma. (p. 5)

Il guaritore mi aveva detto che ero stato saggio a rivolgermi a lui per tempo, spiegandomi che troppa gente afflitta da singhiozzi cronici ricorre all'agopuntura quando è all'ultima spiaggia. Avrebbe impiantato gli aghi nei punti E-37, E-1 ed E-33, e a quel punto avremmo capito per quale via Perkus fosse giunto a quella situazione, sottintendendo come al suo solito che avrebbe fatto scomparire i sintomi per poter passare a questioni più profonde, alla malattia del mondo che per definizione colpisce ogni anima.

We knew it was holy. Every sentence we cherished was sturdy and Biblical in its form, carved somehow by hand-dragged implement or slapped onto sheets by an inky key. For sentences were sculptural, were we the only ones who understood? Sentences were bodies, too, as horny as the flesh-envelopes we wore around the house all day.

Once I had it free, I gobbled the sandwich like a nature-film otter cracking an oyster on its stomach: knees up in the wiring under the dashboard, my elbows jammed against the steering wheel, my chest serving as a table, my shirt as a tablecloth.

For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.