Jonathan Lethem Quotes

what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?

My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.

Anyone could see it all coming and no one could possibly stop it and that was the beautiful thing. Friday night was open wide and writ in stone

Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.

Apologies aren't something you want to get in the habit of practicing in the mirror

Enough of this. Does every conversation with you have to be the director's cut? Get out of the car.

My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.

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

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

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.

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

I'm tightly wound. I'm a loose cannon. Both - I'm a tightly wound loose cannon, a tight loose.

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.

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

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.