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65b73a6
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Today the tower's flock, the usual birds, flew in a kind of scatter pattern, their paths intricately chaotic, the bunch parting and interweaving like boiling pasta under a pot's lifted lid. It appeared someone had given the birds new instructions, had whispered that there was something to avoid, or someone to fool. I once heard Perkus Tooth say that he'd woken that morning having dreamed an enigmatic sentence: "Paranoia is a flower in the b..
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Jonathan Lethem |
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f779597
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I'd forgotten my identity as the world's most pathetic superhero, become a Californian instead.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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e78acb8
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Terms swarm up to tempt me in the course of this description: 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 graspi..
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Jonathan Lethem |
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a93d676
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All Thinking is Wishful.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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68429cb
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The thing about this bookshelf is that each of these books is a vast experience unto itself, while also being both self-contained and superbly useless. Reading any one of them doesn't get you anywhere particularly meaningful; you haven't arrived or graduated; you've just gone and done something that passed the time. It's like taking a long walk with a friend who's got a lot to say. There's not cumulative purpose to it - it's just an excelle..
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Jonathan Lethem |
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b8167d0
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Everything funny in a not-funny-at-all kind of way. Sarcasm as something you practiced like karate. Later concealing your mute fury when nobody fed you the opening lines.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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5fa8701
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Everyone's body betrayed them in different ways, it was all forgiven and never discussed.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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e1a43e2
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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.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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600da43
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You discovered yourself and what really mattered only after you passed through the lens of the fairy tale, imposed on every human female and male alike, that someone existed out in the forest of the world for you to love and marry.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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56ccf47
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I'm tightly wound. I'm a loose cannon. Both - I'm a tightly wound loose cannon, a tight loose.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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82350ac
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Winter days were static glimpsed between channel flips.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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b52ba50
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There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.
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nyc
subway
tourettes
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Jonathan Lethem |
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d64658f
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Did he ever--try?' Mingus shrugged. 'He was like you.' What's that mean?' Means he tried.' Of course. The ring was not a neutral tool. It judged its wearer: Aaron Doily flew drunkenly, and Dylan flew like a coward, only when it didn't matter, at the Windles' pond. So if had attuned to Robert Woolfolk's chaos. Don't tell me,' said Dylan. 'He flew sideways.' Mingus left it vague. He'd always made it his habit to protect their honor against on..
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friendship
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Jonathan Lethem |
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fc24a65
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Anyway, it struck me now in a different light, as being yet another bit of personal meaning which had ben taken from me, stripped off like clothes I'd only borrowed or stolen. I had maybe the least persuasive case for self-pity of any human soul on the planet. Or anyway, the most hilarious.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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afd9011
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The Joker's henchmen break into the museum and empty the display cases; this occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand and becomes a part of the exhibition.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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f340572
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There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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837e63a
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People have to be patient when they're talking to a nervous person.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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799faf0
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We writers aren't sculpting in DNA, or even clay or mud, but words, sentences, paragraphs, syntax, voice; materials issued by tongue or fingertips but which upon release dissolve into the atmosphere, into cloud, confection, specter. Language, as a vehicle, is a lemon, a hot rod painted with thrilling flames but crazily erratic to drive, riddled with bugs like innate self-consciousness, embedded metaphors and symbols, helpless intertextualit..
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Jonathan Lethem |
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a5ad15f
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Did I read The New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn't any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read The New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, not with The New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, w..
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Jonathan Lethem |
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b94f313
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The speaker was stringy and angular, his blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, his plaid workman's shirtsleeves rolled up around his pale biceps. Journalism major, I guessed.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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0969094
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In the sea of words, the 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.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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b86c9a7
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Destroy the traces. I'd never tried to do that. Instead I'd lived in their midst for thirty years, oblivious, a blind man fancying himself invisible.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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310dac2
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Escuchame. Soy timido. No tonto. No puedo mirar a la gente a los ojos. No se si entiendes lo que se siente. Hay todo un mundo que existe a mi alrededor, lo se. No es que no quiera mirarte. Es que no quiero que me vean. Tengo miedo de lo que vereis dentro de mi. Me averguenzo, me da miedo que me mires a los ojos y descubras algo malo, estropeado.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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d7c1a91
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If. If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan's pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, then summer wouldn't give way to whatever came after. If. If. Fat chance. Summer on Dean Street had lasted one day and that day was over, it was dark out, had been for hours. The Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock read nine-thirty in red-and-blue neon. Final score, a million to nothing. The million-dollar kid. Your school wasn't..
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autumn
school
summer
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Jonathan Lethem |
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8287e20
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I've learned not to trust what I see on television.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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dbff182
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The invisible are always so resolutely invisible, until you see them.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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cb6a272
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He couldn't be more than twenty-five, but he obviously lived enough to have things to regret. He looked like he'd taken a long fall a short time ago. Pieces of the man he'd been were jumbled up with the new guy, the lost soul.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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4325c90
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I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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30b1068
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The restaurant, Bongiorno's, was bad and didn't know it. Everything was presented with a passive-aggressive flourish, as though we probably weren't savvy enough to appreciate the oregano-heavy garlic bread, the individual bowls for olive pits, the starched napkins stuffed into our wineglasses, or the waiter's strained enunciation of a long list of specials.
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restaurants
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Jonathan Lethem |
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f23c257
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How strange it began to seem that cars have bodies that never are supposed to touch, a disaster if they do.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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90afc7f
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This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentences--nothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn't rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences:
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writing
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Jonathan Lethem |
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03ddbe3
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He was permanently impressed by the most irrelevant banalities and impossible to impress with real novelty, meaning, or conflict. And he was too moronic to be properly self-loathing--so it was my duty to loathe him instead.
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banality
small-talk
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Jonathan Lethem |
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e2f34c6
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I suppose there was never a reason for tearing down a cabin or scrapping a stopped automobile, if you had all those acres.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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cc7b97a
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Nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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27301c5
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By trying to export myself into a place that didn't fully exist I asked works of art to bear my expectation that they could be better than life, that they could redeem life. In fact, I believe they are, and do. My life is dedicated to that belief. But still, I asked too much of them: I asked them also to be both safer than life and fuller, a better family. That they couldn't give. At the depths I'd plumb them, so many perfectly sufficient w..
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obsession
reality
regret
too-much-affection
too-much-of-a-good-thing
truth
what-you-love
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Jonathan Lethem |
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9afed4d
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The clouds were still bunched up in the sky like a gang on a street corner, and it looked to me like they had the sun pretty effectively intimidated.
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weather-conditions
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Jonathan Lethem |
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c79dea0
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I am relaxed. It's just buried under layers of incredulity and panic. But underneath those I'm very relaxed.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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5e37572
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Sometimes it's better not to think in questions, but I can't seem to get out of the habit.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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0daac83
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It was a rebus of heartbreak, misfortune a dog could parse.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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5be0a29
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Despite their authoritarian light show, those ice-cream trucks of death couldn't do any more for Perkus's murdered infatuation, his crushed crush, than could keening Greek chorus, or a moaning witch doctor.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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acf5f5d
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I'm always serious. That's the tragedy of my life.
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Jonathan Lethem |
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ab704ef
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Life is fundamentally up for grabs
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Jonathan Lethem |
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e61bb29
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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.
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gentrification
vendlemachine
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Jonathan Lethem |
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335988d
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Of all records, Chase, Some Girls! It was in a clutch of the most horrendous crap, J. Geils Band, Sniff 'n' the Tears, the kind of albums you'd use for landfill.
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Jonathan Lethem |