Jonathan Lethem Quotes

Human lives exist to be experienced, or possibly endured, but not solved. They resemble any other novel more than they do mysteries. Westerns, even. It’s that lie the mystery tells that I detest.

There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.

Escúchame. Soy tímido. No tonto. No puedo mirar a la gente a los ojos. No sé si entiendes lo que se siente. Hay todo un mundo que existe a mi alrededor, lo sé. No es que no quiera mirarte. Es que no quiero que me vean. Tengo miedo de lo que veréis dentro de mi. Me avergüenzo, me da miedo que me mires a los ojos y descubras algo malo, estropeado.

Picture us, five floating nudists in oxygen masks, ragged with fatigue and degrees of schock, squeezing the last beads of antifreeze from our hair.

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

Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break every last one of them? All except for one, I suppose: the promise to judge ourselves by those standards, the promise to remember the child who would be so appalled by compromise, the child who would find jadedness wicked.

Yeah, maybe you look a little less familiar yourself.

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

La calidad de una cena la determinan las conversaciones secundarias que la mayoría de la mesa no oye.

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

That's the way it has to be for you. You'll always be living in an FSR."
"FSR?"
"Finite Subjective Reality. That's what I call it. I ought to copyright that, in fact. You go creating a little area of control around you, until you bump into the next guy with his. A little sphere of reality and unreality, sanity and insanity, whatever you pull together. There's no hope of sorting it out. That's the way you live. FSR.

Winter days were static glimpsed between channel flips.

The clacking of the checkers on the hardwood points was the music of honest thought, resounding in silence as it navigated the fortunes told by the pips on the dice.

How strange it began to seem that cars have bodies that never are supposed to touch, a disaster if they do.

He’s just a classic scapegoat, told people things they didn’t want to hear. There’s never any percentage in being ahead of your time.