Quotes from Jonathan Lethem

I gained an insight, a purloined-letter kind of thing.

Thing is, for me a woman has to have a certain amount of muffling, you know what I mean? Something between you, in the way of insulation. Otherwise, you're right up against her naked soul.

Counting is a symptom, but counting symptoms is also a symptom, a tick plus ultra . I've got meta-Tourette's. Thinking about ticcing, my mind racing, thoughts reaching to touch every possible symptom. Touching touching. Counting counting. Thinking thinking. Mentioning mentioning Tourette's. It's sort of like talking about telephones over the telephone, or mailing letters describing the location of various mailboxes. Or like a tugboater whose favorite anecdote concerns actual tugboats.

His jabber had a glottal, chanted quality, seemingly designed to guide you past the territory where you might wish to tell him to shut up already or even to strike him, into a realm of baffled wonderment as you considered the white noise of a nerd's id in full song.

there was language everywhere; you could read the city, the city was a grammar

I turned myself into a vinyl hawk, scouring record shops for out-of-print LPs, studying them with Talmudic intensity. The music I loved would all be dug out of studio archives and put onto CD within a few years, but then it was still scratchy and moldy and entirely my own.

You can't reclaim a thing that changes as you touch it.

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

Develop your pawns or Hulk will smash.

I'd never pondered the bourgeois implications of an earplug.

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.

The whole state of Maine is unlocked.

Sleepwalkers, leave other sleepwalkers alone!

A superhero spliced criminals from victims. In Gowanus things tended to be more mixed up.

Prince's music calmed me as much as masturbation or a cheeseburger.

Or were they bound in slow-cooking love-hate, a folie à deux obscure to anyone outside their secret system?

I am exiting the wider world, to return to my homeland of bullying, psychosis, and bad taste. Forgive me. It is a medical matter. Once

Agli inizi della carriera ero così fesso da credere che il lavoro consistesse nell'individuare un colpevole tra la massa degli innocenti. In realtà si tratta casomai di trovare uno o due innocenti che meritano di essere salvati in mezzo alla massa dei cattivi.

The morning's light danced on the spine of the new bridge, which towered like the guts of a cosmic piano. The same light that agitated the picture windows of the gaudy homes tumbled so recklessly into the seams of the Oakland hills. The

So I took my phone to a bakery and coffee shop called Some Crust and read Elena Ferrante at an outdoor table and hoped for some amusing college student to hit on me. I got hit on by amusing senior citizens instead. Perhaps they, like the Klan, had been lately emboldened.

Television had elected itself, I figured. It could watch itself too, for all I cared. I read my book.

on the one hand there's mansplaining, and on the other, there's the sound of a woman quoting the mansplaining to another woman.

Each might have been a week except for night's failure to come and close the deal. When

The clacking of the checkers on the hardwood points was the music of honest thought, resounding in silence as it navigated the fortunes told by the pips on the dice.