Jonathan Lethem Quotes

The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or introspection or merely to watching a little less television.

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.

This was before cell phones. The desolate spaciousness between humans, between human moments, not yet filled in with chattering ghosts of reassurance. You could hear yourself not think.

There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.

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

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

Nobody said anything while I opened the bag and took out the egg salad sandwich. It was one of those funny moments when a bit of normal human activity embarrasses everybody out of their bluster and hostility, and roles are momentarily laid aside.

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

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

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.

Let him get stoned, since everybody must.

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

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

The house on The Crescent, stepped into the hillside, had no face.

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