Jonathan Lethem

“There are no metaphysics.”

“However appalling to consider, however tedious to enact, every novel requires furniture, whether it is to be named or unnamed, for the characters will be unable to remain in standing position for the duration of the story.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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, with yourself. I tried hard to understand. Apparently here was the paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: The New Yorker's font was controlling, perhaps assailing, Perkus Tooth's mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine's oppressive context. Once I'd enter his apartment to find him on his carpet with a pair of scissors, furiously slicing up and rearranging an issue of the magazine, trying to shatter its spell on his brain.”

“A shadow strolled past the car, indifferent to our curbside melodrama. This was my second time imperiled in a a parked vehicle in the space of three hours. I wondered what goonish spectacles I'd overlooked in my own career as a pavement walker.”

“Just handling this ocean of different books—new and used, in and out of print, famous and forgotten—it was literature as this giant mosaic of texts and experiments and attitudes. I think it’s just very liberating to break out of a great man’s theory of history. I guess I’ve always liked working from that sense of—what would you call it?—license that the margins permit. I always just visualize myself writing books that were meant one day to be dusty, forgotten volumes being encountered by intrepid browsers in a used bookstore. It was a much less freighted way to think about trying to enter the conversation than to imagine I had to write The Great Gatsby.”

“Matthew and Lucinda felt at the exact edge of their lives, feeling them close, closer, as near at hand as yet elusive as the wind that whistled in their hair: the true complete lives in which they would at last drown, the oceanic voyage into their thirties and beyond, through which their inchoate yearnings would either be soothed or disappointed, or both.”

“She craned up on her toes and kissed my cheek..."Don't do that", I said. "You just met me. This is New York.”

“Someday I'd change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.”

“There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.”

“The dentist swiveled on his heels and disappeared, leaving me there to massage my jaw back into feeling after its brief, masochistic marriage to the top of my wooden desk.”

“But we were chumps and we knew it. As makers of sentences we were practically fetal, beneath notice, unlaunched, fooling around in our spare time or on somebody else’s dime. Nobody loved our sentences as we loved them, and so they congealed or grew sour on our tongues.We barely glanced at our wall-scribblings for fear of what a few weeks or even hours might expose in our infatuations. Our photocopied fortune slips we’d find in muddy clogs in storm drains, tangled with advertising flyers, unheeded.Our manuscripts? Those were unspeakable secrets, kept not only from the world but from each other.My pages were shameful, occluded everywhere with xxxxxx’s of regret. I scurried to read Clea’s manuscript every time she left the apartment but never confessed that I even knew it existed.Her title was “Those Young Rangers Thought Love Was a Scandal Like a Bald White Head.” Mine was “I Heard the Laughter of the Sidemen from Behind Their Instruments.”

“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.”

“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: “Esther’s cleavage is something to be noticed” or “You can’t have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture” or “I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves as taste but is in fact nothing of the sort” or “I said I want my eggs scrambled not destroyed.”At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we’d rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant six hundred and twenty-five slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies.”

“Anyone could see it all coming and no one could possibly stop it and that was the beautiful thing. Friday night was open wide and writ in stone”

“Nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man. ”

“I’d forgotten my identity as the world’s most pathetic superhero, become a Californian instead. ”

“May one plead, Your Honor, postmodernism as an involuntary condition?”

“Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.”

“But the stories you told yourself-- which you pretended to recall as if they'd happened every afternoon of an infinite summer-- were really a pocketful of days distorted into legend, another jailhouse exaggeration, like the dimensions of those ballpoint-crosshatched tits or of the purported mountains of blow you once used to enjoy, or how you'd bellowed an avenger's roar when you squeezed the trigger of a pistol you'd actually brandished in self-pissing terror. How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned a few afternoons long, in the end.”

“I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.”

“Behold the onset of my flinty tone. Along with so much else, a soft-tissue sarcoma can apparently drain the exultation from one's prose.”

“Picture us, five floating nudists in oxygen masks, ragged with fatigue and degrees of schock, squeezing the last beads of antifreeze from our hair.”

“Tourette's is just one big lifetime of tag, really. The world (or my brain---same thing) appoints me it, again and again. So I tag back. Can it do otherwise? If you've ever been it you know the answer.”

“I was famously in love with a woman who had no time to spare, not even a breath, for she dwelled in a place beyond time or the reach of anyone’s Rolodex, her every breath measured out of pressurized tanks.”

“I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me. ”

“Enough of this. Does every conversation with you have to be the director's cut? Get out of the car.”

“Dylan's friend Linus Millberg appears out of the crowd with a cup of beer and shouts, 'Dorothy is John Lennon, the Scarecrow is Paul McCartney, the Tin Woodman is George Harrison, the Lion's Ringo.''Star Trek,' commands Dylan over the lousy twangy country CB's is playing between sets.'Easy,' Linus shouts back. "Kirk's John, Spock's Paul, Bones is George, Scotty is Ringo. Or Chekov, after the first season. Doesn't matter, it's like a Scotty-Chekov-combination Ringo. Spare parts are always surplus Georges or Ringos.''But isn't Spock-lacks-a-heart and McCoy-lacks-a-brain like Woodman and Scarecrow? So Dorothy's Kirk?''You don't get it. That's just a superficial coincidence. The Beatle thing is an archetype, it's like the basic human formation. Everything naturally forms into a Beatles, people can't help it.''Say the types again.''Responsible-parent genius-parent genius-child clown-child.''Okay, do Star Wars.''Luke Paul, Han Solo John, Chewbacca George, the robots Ringo.''Tonight Show.''Uh, Johnny Carson Paul, the guest John, Ed McMahon Ringo, whatisname George.''Doc Severinson.''Yeah, right. See, everything revolves around John, even Paul. That's why John's the guest.''And Severinson's quiet but talented, like a Wookie.''You begin to understand.”

“I‘ve always agreed with the view that — with science fiction — its predictive powers were the least important or least relevant aspect of its public profile. I always loved stuff like Orwell‘s 1984, where he explicitly said “It‘s 1948, reversed.” I liked writers that were doing allegorical, satirical, fantastical versions of everyday life.”

“For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.”

“what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?”

“Winter days were static glimpsed between channel flips.”

“All Thinking is Wishful.”

“It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.”

“To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions.”

“Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break every last one of them? All except for one, I suppose: the promise to judge ourselves by those standards, the promise to remember the child who would be so appalled by compromise, the child who would find jadedness wicked.”

“You can't be deep without a surface”

“The tragedy of being old is you can no longer apply whats taken you so long to learn (Kissing The Beehive)”

“Nobody said anything while I opened the bag and took out the egg salad sandwich. It was one of those funny moments when a bit of normal human activity embarrasses everybody out of their bluster and hostility, and roles are momentarily laid aside.”

“What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?”

“How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end.As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a whim. So why think of it at all?”

“Zelmo was nearly bellowing by the time he raised his glass to the tables center. 'To the human heart!' Diners at other tables glanced to see what was the matter.”

“Fifth grade was fourth grade with something wrong. Nothing changed outright. Instead it teetered. You'd pushed futility at Public School 38 so long by then you expected the building itself would be embarrassed and quit. The ones who couldn't read still couldn't, the teachers were teaching the same thing for the fifth time now and refusing to meet your eyes, some kids had been left back twice and were the size of janitors. The place was a cage for growing, nothing else. School lunch turned out to be the five-year-plan, the going concern. You couldn't be left back from fish sticks and sloppy joes. You'd retain at the least two thousand half-pint containers of vitamin D-enriched chocolate milk.Two black guys from the projects, twins, were actually named Ronald and Donald MacDonald. The twins themselves only shrugged, couldn't be made to agree it was incredible.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or inspection or merely to watching a little less television. The voices of Barrett Rude Jr. and the Subtle Distinctions lead nowhere, though, if not back to your own neighborhood. To the street where you live. To things you left behind.And that's what you need, what you needed all along.”

“His recording career spans just a decade: Rude was silenced by drug abuse and domestic tragedy at the end of the '70s.”

“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 one another--Dylan, Arthur, Robert. To say nothing.”

“They got stoneder and stoneder and quit talking.”