Jonathan Lethem > Quotes

“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.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

“I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.”
― Jonathan Lethem, You Don't Love Me Yet

“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.”
― Jonathan Lethem

“What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“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.”
― Jonathan Lethem, You Don't Love Me Yet

“You can't be deep without a surface”
― Jonathan Lethem, You Don't Love Me Yet

“You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have made substantial amounts of money for one another.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Men and Cartoons: Stories

“Someday I'd change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

“There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“Every room I've lived in since I was given my own room at eleven was lined with, and usually overfull of, books. My employment in bookstores was always continuous with my private hours: shelving and alphabetizing, building shelves, and browsing-- in my collection and others-- in order to understand a small amount about the widest possible number of books. Such numbers of books are constantly acquired that constant culling is necessary; if I slouch in this discipline, the books erupt. I've also bricked myself in with music--vinyl records, then compact discs. My homes have been improbably information-dense, like capsules for survival of a nuclear war, or models of the interior of my own skull. That comparison--room as brain-- is one I've often reached for in describing the rooms of others, but it began with the suspicion that I'd externalized my own brain, for anyone who cared to look.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Disappointment Artist: Essays

“...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?”
― Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City

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

“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.”
― Jonathan Lethem, As She Climbed Across the Table

“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.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Gun, With Occasional Music

“My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.”
― Jonathan Lethem, As She Climbed Across the Table

“Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

“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”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

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

“Apologies aren't something you want to get in the habit of practicing in the mirror”
― Jonathan Lethem, Gun, With Occasional Music

“Enough of this. Does every conversation with you have to be the director's cut? Get out of the car.”
― Jonathan Lethem , Motherless Brooklyn

“My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.”
― Jonathan Lethem, As She Climbed Across the Table

“It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.”
― Jonathan Lethem, You Don't Love Me Yet

“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.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

“To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions.”
― Jonathan Lethem, You Don't Love Me Yet

“I'm tightly wound. I'm a loose cannon. Both - I'm a tightly wound loose cannon, a tight loose.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

“I jotted the name down mentally on that tattered notepad I call a memory. The pen skipped.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Gun, With Occasional Music

“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.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

“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.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Gun, With Occasional Music