Jonathan Lethem

“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.”

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

“Listen to me. I’m shy. I’m not stupid. I can’t meet people’s eyes. I don’t know if you understand what that’s like. There’s a whole world going on around me, I’m aware of that. It’s not because I don’t want to look at you, Lucinda. It’s that I don’t want to be seen.”

“Punctuation! We knew it was holy. Every sentence we cherished was sturdy and Biblical in its form, carved somehow by hand-dragged implement or slapped onto sheets by an inky key. For sentences were sculptural, were we the only ones who understood? Sentences were bodies, too, as horny as the flesh-envelopes we wore around the house all day. Erotically enjambed in our loft bed, Clea patrolled my utterances for subject, verb, predicate, as a chef in a five-star kitchen would minister a recipe, insuring that a soufflé or sourdough would rise. A good brave sentence (“I can hardly bear your heel at my nape without roaring”) might jolly Clea to instant climax. We’d rise from the bed giggling, clutching for glasses of cold water that sat in pools of their own sweat on bedside tables. The sentences had liberated our higher orgasms, nothing to sneeze at. Similarly, we were also sure that sentences of the right quality could end this hideous endless war, if only certain standards were adopted at the higher levels. They never would be. All the media trumpeted the Administration’s lousy grammar.”

“Escúchame. Soy tímido. No tonto. No puedo mirar a la gente a los ojos. No sé si entiendes lo que se siente. Hay todo un mundo que existe a mi alrededor, lo sé. No es que no quiera mirarte. Es que no quiero que me vean. Tengo miedo de lo que veréis dentro de mi. Me avergüenzo, me da miedo que me mires a los ojos y descubras algo malo, estropeado.”

“La calidad de una cena la determinan las conversaciones secundarias que la mayoría de la mesa no oye.”

“- Eso es muy superficial.- No se puede ser profundo sin superficie.”

“Vierte amor en las heridas.”

“The revving heart of my hopefulness, kicked into gear anew, is the most precious thing about me, I refuse to vilify it.”

“The invisible are always so resolutely invisible, until you see them.”

“Life is fundamentally up for grabs”

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

“People have to be patient when they're talking to a nervous person.”

“There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.”

“I've learned not to trust what I see on television.”

“I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.”

“I met someone who lives in an elevator.”

“The earth itself was unchangeable, the endless tracts of sand and water and pavement. It was the people, the perturbable madmen who roamed its surface, who viewed the world as transient and broken. Everett wished the earth could somehow reach up and still them, the crazy people, and invest them with its silence and permanence and depth.”

“You can't reclaim a thing that changes as you touch it.”

“Develop your pawns or Hulk will smash.”

“...Paranoid art, unlike paranoid persons, also distrusts itself. And so, paranoid art is the ultimate opposite, the urgent opposite, of complacent art.”

“Paranoia has its downsides as an agency in daily life, or in the political sphere of collective action, which finds itself beset everywhere by the nightmarish influence of conspiracy thinking (they call it theory, but theories exist to be tested, and conspiracy thinking exists never to be tested, and globally ignores the results of tests imposed by others). The suspicion that malign operators are responsible for every one of the injustices and heartbreaks of existence is a consoling view, a balm to bleak glimpses of the void behind our reality. It's brave to pursue truth, and brave to pursue and expose tricky and well-hidden bad guys (Nazi doctors, Pentagon intelligence-distorters, etc.). It's not brave to think tricky, well-hidden bad guys are the whole truth of what's out there. It might even be bravery's opposite. Or maybe it should go under the name "religion.”

“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 can't trust what its light reveals.”

“The waiting area was jammed with the sort of egalitarian cross-section only genuine misery can provide: Hispanics and blacks and Russians and various indeterminate, red-eyed teenage girls with children you prayed were siblings; junkie veterans petitioning for painkillers they wouldn't get;”

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

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

“My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.”

“It was a rebus of heartbreak, misfortune a dog could parse.”

“I suppose there was never a reason for tearing down a cabin or scrapping a stopped automobile, if you had all those acres.”

“When I was a boy I used to love pizza, and whenever my father took me to the pizzeria I'd order two slices. And I'd sit and he'd watch me wolfing down the first slice with my eyes on the second. I wasn't even tasting that first slice. And one day my father said to me, "Son, you need to learn that while you're eating the first slice of pizza, eat the first slice. Because right now you're eating the second slice before you've finished the first.”

“The desires our little family couldn't afford to indulge had never seemed important, only snobbish and silly and somehow misplaced, like Thurston Howell's priorities on Gilligan's Island. Besides, I'd had as much or more money than most kids I'd known in Brooklyn, if somewhat less than the majority of my Manhattan schoolmates at Stuyvesant, so figured I was somewhere in the middle. Yeah, sure, that was it: I was middle class.”

“The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time *isn't*.”

“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.”

“Everyone's body betrayed them in different ways, it was all forgiven and never discussed.”

“A superhero spliced criminals from victims. In Gowanus things tended to be more mixed up.”

“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.”

“You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.”

“Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.”

“I'd underestimated him. I assumed anyone who started out gut-punching you in an elevator couldn't have all that much else in his arsenal. For instance, I had no idea he could smile, let alone at such an inappropriate time.”

“I raised that kid like I was running an egg-and-spoon race through a minefield, and he was the egg.”

“In the sea of words, the in print 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.”

“Sleepwalkers, leave other sleepwalkers alone!”

“...Don't rupture another's illusion unless you're positive the alternative you offer is more worthwhile than that from which you're wrenching them. Interrogate your solipsism: Does it offer any better a home than the delusions you're reaching to shatter?”

“We were in a middle space then, in a cone of white, father and son moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream.”

“The wind was picking up off the ocean now and the whole coastal scene had a bleak, abandoned look, as though Maine in November really belonged to the ragged gulls who wheeled over the sun-worn pier, and the humans had just gotten the news and taken a powder.”

“Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement.”

“Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.”

“But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.”

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

“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 brain." Perkus offered this, then smirked and bugged his eyes--the ordinary eye, and the other. I played at amazement (I was amazed, anyway, at the fact that Perkus dreamed sentences to begin with). Yet I hadn't understood what the words meant to him until now, when I knew for a crucial instant that the birds had been directed to deceive me. That was when I saw the brain's flower. Perkus had, I think, been trying to prepare me for how beautiful it was.”