Jonathan Lethem Quotes

Grips slipped. Hers had from every surface. She's shaped nothing after all, only been crushed and reshaped. No wonder she felt for the brownstones, the cripples, now filling chaotically with no regard for her plan.

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

To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions.

Does every conversation with you have to be the director’s cut?

Mingus Rude, Arthur Lomb, Gabriel Stern and Tim Vandertooth, even Aaron K. Doily: Dylan never met anyone who wasn't about to change immediately into someone else. His was a special talent for encountering persons about to shed one identity or disguise for another. He took it in stride by now.

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

Like other names I censored lately, this was a vote against invoking monsters, against etching their reality into the air.

Basically every two-bit libertarian, free-range asshole you'll ever meet is just waiting for someone to talk them in default cop.

You can't be deep without a surface.

In the sea of words, the in print is foam, surf bubbles riding the top. And it's a dark sea, and deep, where divers need lights on their helmets and would perish at the lower depths.

A shadow strolled past the car, indifferent to our curbside melodrama. This was my second time imperiled in a a parked vehicle in the space of three hours. I wondered what goonish spectacles I'd overlooked in my own career as a pavement walker.

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.

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.

Relax,' she said. 'There's nothing wrong with a slow, awkward beginning. The text for the whole relationship, the sustaining mythos, is built in the first few encounters. The whirl of emotions, the push and pull. So the more of this kind of material we generate, the better.

This is a dystopia, but also a post-apocalypse. The dystopia survived the apocalypse, nobody can get their head around it — too bad! You can do post-apocalypse things, survivalist stuff, rationing, killing, new tribalism, but you can also go the dystopia route, struggle against the decadent lords and masters, smash the seductive machine that’s controlling your head. Just because you’re crazy doesn’t mean you’re not also stupid, and neither precludes the possibility that you’ve got your boot on the neck of someone even worse off.