blow the sixty bucks on a movie on Shattuck, on a bucket of fake-buttered popcorn and a shoe-box-size carton of Whoppers or Junior Mints. Cradling th… - Jonathan Lethem

"Laughing at "Rapper's Delight"'s no revenge, and anyway it wasn't your idea, and anyway it's funny. Dean Street's another story, a realm of knowledge unapplicable here.
You've just about finished leaving Dean Street, and Aeroman, behind.
If this means avoiding the one who protected your ass all through junior high, the one you once ached to emulate, the one whose orbit you were happy just to swing in - if it means leaving the million-dollar kid's regular phone messages in Abraham's precise handwriting unreturned - that's a small price to pay for growing up, isn't it?
This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no foolin' around.
It's the end, the end of the seventies."

The alphabet Miss Poobner taught was represented on the wall above her head by a series of personified cartoonlike letters — Mr. A, Eating an Apple; Mrs. B, Buying a Broom; and so on — and something insipid about the parade of grinning letters defeated Dylan's will utterly.

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