Quotes from Jonathan Lethem

Mingus Rude, Arthur Lomb, Gabriel Stern and Tim Vandertooth, even Aaron K. Doily: 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. He took it in stride by now.

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

This kiss would be with me, invisible badge or scar, when I went back to the apartment.

The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or introspection or merely to watching a little less television.

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

Mrs. Neverbody's Recipe for Making Crocodile Tears To a slice of hanky-panky Add some artificial cranky. Moisten well with canned boo-hoo. Flavor with a spoof or two. Drip this slowly—as it falls Roll it into little bawls. If you're careful, while they're cooling You can spread on only-fooling. (This recipe is not worthwhile Unless you are a crocodile.)

Like other names I censored lately, this was a vote against invoking monsters, against etching their reality into the air.

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;

Her fiercest sincerities were translated by the male ego, on arrival, into daffy flirtation. (p. 24)

Once I had it free, I gobbled the sandwich like a nature-film otter cracking an oyster on its stomach: knees up in the wiring under the dashboard, my elbows jammed against the steering wheel, my chest serving as a table, my shirt as a tablecloth.

The alphabet Miss Poobner taught was represented on the wall above her head by a series of personified cartoonlike letters--Mr. A, Eating an Apple; Mrs. B, Buying a Broom; and so on--and something insipid about the parade of grinning letters defeated Dylan's will utterly.

Go buy milk,' Robert said at last. Dylan moved for Buggy's door. But if ou come around here with that old lady's money next time I might have to take it off you.' Dylan recognized this as a sort of philosophical using. He was grateful for the implied sense of pooled information. He and Robert could move forward together from this point into whatever was required.

Here's the strangeness of having a Tourette's brain, then: no control in my personal experiment of self. What might be only strangeness must always be auditioned for relegation to the domain of symptom, just as symptoms always push into other domains, demanding the chance to audition for their moment of acuity or relevance, their brief shot—coulda been a contender!—at centrality. Personalityness. There's a lot of traffic in my head, and it's two-way.

Astrology fell into the class of a fake lie ...and not worth the efforts of the debunking engine Cicero had been born with in place of a brain. Cicero's capacities were reserved for lies that mattered. Ideology, though that word was yet unknown to him: the veil of sustaining fiction that drove the world, what people needed to believe. This, Cicero wished to unmask and unmake, decry and destroy. (p. 65)

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

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

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.

This was before cell phones. The desolate spaciousness between humans, between human moments, not yet filled in with chattering ghosts of reassurance. You could hear yourself not think.

Vierte amor en las heridas.

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

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.

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

We were all four of us an arrangement around a missing centrepiece, as incoherent as a verb-less sentence.

To tugboat was to try Minna's patience. Any time you pushed your luck, said too much, overstayed a welcome, or overestimated the usefulness of a given method or approach, you were guilty of having tugged the boat. Tugboating was most of all a dysfunction of wits and storytellers, and a universal one. Anybody who thought himself funny would likely tug a boat here or there. Knowing when a joke or verbal gambit was right at its limit, quitting before the boat had been tugged, that was art.