The stumbling block will turn out to be the traditional one for students of consciousness: the flashlight is incapable of shining on itself, so we ca… - Jonathan Lethem

The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism.

To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interweave, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement demolishing workmen periodically wrench open into daylight and to our passing, disturbed glances.

Chaos didn't know what this meant. He kept feeling like somehow, intending to travel across land, he'd traveled through time instead.