Jonathan Lethem Quotes

Baader-Meinhof Gruppe, they are called also.” “Yes.

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

Tourette's is just one big lifetime of tag, really. The world (or my brain — -same thing) appoints me it, again and again. So I tag back. Can it do otherwise? If you've ever been it you know the answer.

"Dylan's friend Linus Millberg appears out of the crowd with a cup of beer and shouts, 'Dorothy is John Lennon, the Scarecrow is Paul McCartney, the Tin Woodman is George Harrison, the Lion's Ringo.'
'Star Trek,' commands Dylan over the lousy twangy country CB's is playing between sets.
'Easy,' Linus shouts back. "Kirk's John, Spock's Paul, Bones is George, Scotty is Ringo. Or Chekov, after the first season. Doesn't matter, it's like a Scotty-Chekov-combination Ringo. Spare parts are always surplus Georges or Ringos.'
'But isn't Spock-lacks-a-heart and McCoy-lacks-a-brain like Woodman and Scarecrow? So Dorothy's Kirk?'
'You don't get it. That's just a superficial coincidence. The Beatle thing is an archetype, it's like the basic human formation. Everything naturally forms into a Beatles, people can't help it.'
'Say the types again.'
'Responsible-parent genius-parent genius-child clown-child.'
'Okay, do Star Wars.'
'Luke Paul, Han Solo John, Chewbacca George, the robots Ringo.'
'Tonight Show.'
'Uh, Johnny Carson Paul, the guest John, Ed McMahon Ringo, whatisname George.'
'Doc Severinson.'
'Yeah, right. See, everything revolves around John, even Paul. That's why John's the guest.'
'And Severinson's quiet but talented, like a Wookie.'
'You begin to understand.

- Eso es muy superficial.
- No se puede ser profundo sin superficie.

Her presence was sturdy and watery at once, arms weirdly muscled, nipples like small tongues riding on the mercurial flesh that glided on his surface, thighs smooth to where his fingers plummeted inside, followed by the rest of him. The golf-ball cyst swam too, faintly present against him, a feature, not a bug. Tira, for all her usual chatter, wasn’t a screamer or even a moaner. In the silence their breaths fell into concert with the whining Murphy springs. Bruno’s mind felt poured into hers as well, at least conveyed a great distance out of his body.

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

You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.

Agli inizi della carriera ero così fesso da credere che il lavoro consistesse nell'individuare un colpevole tra la massa degli innocenti. In realtà si tratta casomai di trovare uno o due innocenti che meritano di essere salvati in mezzo alla massa dei cattivi.

The speaker was stringy and angular, his blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, his plaid workman's shirtsleeves rolled up around his pale biceps. Journalism major, I guessed.

what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?

It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.

on the one hand there’s mansplaining, and on the other, there’s the sound of a woman quoting the mansplaining to another woman.

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.

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.