Jonathan Lethem Quotes

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

The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or inspection or merely to watching a little less television. The voices of Barrett Rude Jr. and the Subtle Distinctions lead nowhere, though, if not back to your own neighborhood. To the street where you live. To things you left behind.
And that's what you need, what you needed all along.

(I)t was by Cicero's attainments that that he'd gained special witness to the liberals' adjustment to a brush with actual equality.

To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interweave, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement demolishing workmen periodically wrench open into daylight and to our passing, disturbed glances.

Journeyman himself had a kind of tone deafness when it came to Eastern stuff, or at least to the Eastern stuff spouted by Westerners who fancied themselves enlightened.

He didn't hide his teeth, which were bright yellow, like the van we'd unloaded.

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.

The world was ersatz and actual, forged and faked, by ourselves and unseen others. Daring to attempt to absolutely sort fake from real was a folly that would call down tigers or hiccups to cure us of our recklessness. The effort was doomed, for it too much pointed past the intimate boundaries of our necessary fictions.

The alphabet Miss Poobner taught was represented on the wall above her head by a series of personified cartoonlike letters — Mr. A, Eating an Apple; Mrs. B, Buying a Broom; and so on — and something insipid about the parade of grinning letters defeated Dylan's will utterly.

The Hippie Parents weren't for all their distraction and funk, for their love triangles and LPs and antiwar demonstrations, illiterates...You'd find the books in the downstairs bathroom, or on their bedside tables, or maybe see them unwrapped at holidays as gifts, a cherished revelation passed from one to another, shared like a joint...

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

Scout, that's a good one," said the sergeant. "Danny-boy couldn't scout the inside of his eyelids.

I turned myself into a vinyl hawk, scouring record shops for out-of-print LPs, studying them with Talmudic intensity. The music I loved would all be dug out of studio archives and put onto CD within a few years, but then it was still scratchy and moldy and entirely my own.

You remind me of myself, once upon a time. We’re not really that different even now. We chafe at our bits—but you’re stubborn, inflexible. Stupid, finally. I’ve learned to compromise. In negotiation lies power, viability. Your inflexibility has rendered you marginal.

"She craned up on her toes and kissed my cheek..."Don't do that", I said. "You just met me. This is New York.