Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn… - Jonathan Lethem

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.

Bruno’s brain might have parachuted somewhere over the Atlantic.

Terms swarm up to tempt me in the course of this description: Greek Orthodox, Romanesque, flying buttress, etc. These guessing words I find junked in my brain in deranged juxtaposition, like files randomly stuffed into cabinets by a dispirited secretary with no notion of what, if anything, might ever be usefully retrieved. Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I’m helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don’t. Yet I go around forming sentences.