Jonathan Lethem Quotes

I’d forgotten my identity as the world’s most pathetic superhero, become a Californian instead.

I’d joined the ever-growing category of things that look better when you leave the light off.

Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement.

As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have made substantial amounts of money for one another.

"I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced."

You consider yourself an outsider, a seeker of truth amidst lies, yet you’ve bought into the biggest lie that can be told. You snort it through your nose and let it run in your bloodstream.

Flirtation, so effortlessly accomplished. Mention of the train had done it. Train unspecified; they both knew which. They’d ridden together and now shared the ferry, and though a thousand identical to her might have strolled past his Charlottenburg café window in two weeks, the shared destination worked its paltry magic. And both tall. This little was enough to excuse lust as destiny.

Counting is a symptom, but counting symptoms is also a symptom, a tick plus ultra. I've got meta-Tourette's. Thinking about ticcing, my mind racing, thoughts reaching to touch every possible symptom. Touching touching. Counting counting. Thinking thinking. Mentioning mentioning Tourette's. It's sort of like talking about telephones over the telephone, or mailing letters describing the location of various mailboxes. Or like a tugboater whose favorite anecdote concerns actual tugboats.

Prince's music calmed me as much as masturbation or a cheeseburger.

On Telegraph, she stopped him in front of Walgreens, put the sack into his hands, a finger to her lips. “I’ll come back.” He was left to contemplate the sidewalk, full of listless earring vendors ready with their piercing guns.

I jotted the name down mentally on that tattered notepad I call a memory. The pen skipped.

We were all four of us an arrangement around a missing centrepiece, as incoherent as a verb-less sentence.