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Top Jonathan Lethem Quotes

Browse top 100 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Jonathan Lethem.

Favorite Jonathan Lethem Quotes

1. "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;" ~ Jonathan Lethem
2. "Life is fundamentally up for grabs" ~ Jonathan Lethem
3. "His recording career spans just a decade: Rude was silenced by drug abuse and domestic tragedy at the end of the '70s." ~ Jonathan Lethem
4. "I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost." ~ Jonathan Lethem
5. "There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time." ~ Jonathan Lethem
6. "Develop your pawns or Hulk will smash." ~ Jonathan Lethem
7. "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 intertextuality, and so forth. Despite being regularly driven on prosaic errands (interoffice memos, supermarket receipts, etc.), it tends to veer on its misaligned chassis into the ditch of abstraction, of dream." ~ Jonathan Lethem
8. "Yeah, maybe you look a little less familiar yourself." ~ Jonathan Lethem
9. "Mai infrangere le illusioni degli altri se non si è certi di poter offrir loro un'alternativa migliore di quella a cui li si vuole strappare." ~ Jonathan Lethem
10. "…Carlotta hovered over us as we devoured her meatballs, running her floury fingers over the backs of our chairs, then gently touching our heads, the napes of our necks. We pretended not to notice, ashamed in front of one another and ourselves to show that we drank in her nurturance as eagerly as her meat sauce." ~ Jonathan Lethem
11. "This kiss would be with me, invisible badge or scar, when I went back to the apartment." ~ Jonathan Lethem
12. "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." ~ Jonathan Lethem
13. "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." ~ Jonathan Lethem
14. "It wasn't for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area." ~ Jonathan Lethem
15. "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 on fire, you were." ~ Jonathan Lethem
16. "Enough of this. Does every conversation with you have to be the director's cut? Get out of the car." (Motherless Brooklyn)" ~ Jonathan Lethem
17. "What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?" ~ Jonathan Lethem
18. "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." ~ Jonathan Lethem
19. "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." ~ Jonathan Lethem
20. "They got stoneder and stoneder and quit talking." ~ Jonathan Lethem
21. "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." ~ Jonathan Lethem
22. "- Eso es muy superficial.- No se puede ser profundo sin superficie." ~ Jonathan Lethem
23. "There are no metaphysics." ~ Jonathan Lethem
24. "Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement." ~ Jonathan Lethem
25. "Picture us, five floating nudists in oxygen masks, ragged with fatigue and degrees of schock, squeezing the last beads of antifreeze from our hair." ~ Jonathan Lethem
26. "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." ~ Jonathan Lethem
27. "I met someone who lives in an elevator." ~ Jonathan Lethem
28. "You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all." ~ Jonathan Lethem
29. "Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble." ~ Jonathan Lethem
30. "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
31. "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
32. "My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign." ~ Jonathan Lethem
33. "what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?" ~ Jonathan Lethem
34. "...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
35. "My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet." ~ Jonathan Lethem
36. "It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed." ~ Jonathan Lethem
37. "But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps." ~ Jonathan Lethem
38. "Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit." ~ Jonathan Lethem
39. "I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me." ~ Jonathan Lethem
40. "I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way." ~ Jonathan Lethem
41. "Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature and my love of film." ~ Jonathan Lethem
42. "I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull." ~ Jonathan Lethem
43. "I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously." ~ Jonathan Lethem
44. "I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world." ~ Jonathan Lethem
45. "It was good while it was good." ~ Jonathan Lethem
46. "The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals." ~ Jonathan Lethem
47. "What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark." ~ Jonathan Lethem
48. "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
49. "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?" ~ Jonathan Lethem
50. "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." ~ Jonathan Lethem
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I think modern television shows, with their intricate plots, are stimulating our minds. This is one reason IQs have been going up."
Author: Alex Tabarrok

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Thin
Wit
Ear
End
Con
Ten
Here
Per
Self
Off
Ours
Bee
Lit
Ally
Hen
Act
Hey
Era
Less
Tan
Side
She
Sit
Win
Thou
Sin
Another
Hear
Last
Heart
Rain
Ring
Ways
Able
Each
Read
Matt
May
Tend
Los
Pen
Rent
Might
Sing
Rid
Round
Fat
Head
Arts
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