Jonathan Lee > Quotes

“At the age of eighty-three he had the self-awareness necessary to be patient with other people, but not always the facility to disguise the effort.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“New York didn’t set out to charm you. It was like God that way. You had to bring a lot of the enthusiasm yourself.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“There are certain grudges that are every bit as irrational as they are uplifting. A person must protect them at all costs, especially in old age.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“Viv used to say there were two types of person in life, past tense and present tense. Viv had seen herself as a present-tense person, which gave her an excuse never to discuss what she felt about a thing that had already happened.”
― Jonathan Lee, High Dive

“His family feared he might one day succumb to the catastrophe of being a poet.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“The difference, in the end, between life and death is perhaps nothing more than movement?”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“exercise his brain and keep him fed, but how to gain any traction? Books, he thought. Books, books, books. Books to get him somewhere. Books to turn him into someone. Books to grab hold of on his way up. Books as a way to be alone without feeling so alone.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“All the best paintings made you see various levels of reality at once. They sent you inward as well as outward.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“How do we picture the past? Does it become clearer as it drifts into the distance? Can it be seen from more angles, a better vantage, with finer instruments for optics, and more supporting documentation to draw from? Or has its essence already vanished, leaving space for lies to multiply and thrive, spreading across paperwork that is good for nothing except, perhaps, a nervous acting captain's next snack?”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“...the only category available to him [Andrew Haswell Green] in this bitter world of unequal wealth would be, at best, gentleman of four outs.

Without money, his father said. Without credit. Without wit.

That's three, Andrew said.

Without manners.

And in his father's eyes, as he concluded his assessment, were there not signs of a smile? Love was present, Andrew felt, but its shine was hard to find.

He would go looking for it everywhere in the years to come. Love, love, love. As if it were a coin to be found in a field, or a park. As if it could be obtained without forfeiture.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“Love. This was the way not to fall into forgetting. Love, and a good publicist.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“He would go looking for it everywhere in the years to come. Love, love, love. As if it were a coin to be found in a field, or a park. As if it could be obtained without forfeiture.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“She hated this feeling, the sensation of trying and failing to get her arms around something big. The way political opinions seemed always to be expressed with a total sureness of tone. The way that sureness was at odds with every true thought she'd ever had.”
― Jonathan Lee, High Dive

“You wake up one day and realize you are a different person. That seems to be how life happens, how it establishes its patterns. The adult becomes a stranger to the boy he used to be. You become distant from everybody, especially yourself, even if, in the secrecy of your heart, you feel mostly unchanged.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“You disintegrated into the recriminations, the headlines, the pictures. You scattered yourself into proofs, warnings, suspicions, arrests. You rode out into the dark outrage of others, saw human loss shaped towards political ends, and though you hoped for the occasional gleam of uncontaminated compassion it seemed that the world was dimming.”
― Jonathan Lee, High Dive

“A revelation is like a sneeze. Sounds unlikely, but it is. It can be lost, can simply vanish, if one does not look straight into the light and ask the inside to come out.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“It is always better to clear the air, even if the air often stinks.”
― Jonathan Lee, High Dive

“So yes, he could be funny. If you thought such things were funny. And the coffee had to be made with a specific number of beans. He could taste any errors in arithmetic.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“If you pay too much attention to time, in certain tedious moments, it slows down to punish you.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“There may be mistakes in the choice of means to attain an end. But success or failure also involves much that lies beyond our power. We are not responsible for the inevitable, nor for a knowledge that is beyond our reach. Solely the ends, honestly chosen, and consistently sought, determine the moral quality of a life.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“the embrace—one that seems to lack a center. A feeling of being held only by the very edges of who you are. Of wanting, so intensely, to be brought into the heart.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“A great lawyer is not only learned in the law, so that when the brief is laid before him he may place this fact with that. A great lawyer is also an artist. He is able to march into a land of untamed information and make it adhere to his own idea of order, creating a successful system where only chaos has hitherto reigned. In the mind of a great lawyer there exists a private tribunal of sense and feeling. He puts good with good, bad with bad, and resigns the false to the false. He strikes at vulnerable points in the evidence of others. He throws firm assertions into cloudy confusion. he finds the affinity that exists between actual events, connecting the everyday with the unexpected, and by weaving lines of testimony within and around the statements of strangers, through the most perplexing phases of fabrication, can bring the truth to light if it suits his client's case, or throw it into shadow if it doesn't. If he can master this art of light and dark, he can in the process become rather rich.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“I was the outsider in Fernhall House, but they were all outsiders really. Outside society. Outside time. You hear people say that those in asylums and care facilities are out of their minds. But in truth their minds are often the one thing they are not out of. Their whole being is sheltering behind walls of muscle and bone. Everything they are - and are not - exists within their sacrosanct headspace.”
― Jonathan Lee, Who is Mr Satoshi?

“He is wearing the better of the two worst shirts his third-favorite brother let him borrow.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“Two errors, wrote Pascal, a thinker Andrew once admired. One: to take everything literally. Two: to take everything spiritually.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“He [Andrew Haswell Green] wanted to say, Don't go, but he still did not know how. To open himself up to a hard, hurtful truth again seemed the very worst of options. Some people are perhaps meant to live alone.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“...life amounts, above all else, to the recruiting of witnesses.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“At a certain age we forget to be afraid of people. We start to dread, instead, their absence.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“I believe that one can never be an elegant man without a taste for reading.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake

“Praise and censure went down exactly the same drain, though he [Andrew Haswell Green] admittedly preferred the friendly trickle of the former.”
― Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake