Quotes from Jonathan Lethem

Chaos didn't know what this meant. He kept feeling like somehow, intending to travel across land, he'd traveled through time instead.

She reassembled her deranged silent treatment of the whole of the twentieth century, but it quit before she could fire it.

Except science now tells us that luck is there whether you acknowledge it or not. And I'm afraid in your case I see the signs of a history of bad luck. Not even a latency so much as a full-blown case going completely ignored for lack of context.

His ironies were ghoulish now.

Minutes died serially into hours. Bruno

How's it feel to be a worthless jumbo diddly-ass puppetool?

Bruno's brain might have parachuted somewhere over the Atlantic.

Not everything needed to rise to converge: It could just drift together into the indiscernible middle, and bewilder you.

The big Nazi cat went on raking up thread-loops from my trousers, seemingly intent on single-handedly reinventing Velcro.

They were drones, men costumed in independent thought who'd become slaves of party groupspeak. (p. 4)

On Telegraph, she stopped him in front of Walgreens, put the sack into his hands, a finger to her lips. "I'll come back." He was left to contemplate the sidewalk, full of listless earring vendors ready with their piercing guns.

His imprecision and laziness maddened my compulsive instincts—his patchiness, the way even his speech was riddled with drop-outs and glitches like a worn cassette, the way his leaden senses refused the world

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

To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interweave, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement demolishing workmen periodically wrench open into daylight and to our passing, disturbed glances.

We admit the presence of no author, no oeuvre, and no genre. The text stands bare. . . . We admit nothing outside of the text.

I argue against depth wherever I find it.

He didn't hide his teeth, which were bright yellow, like the van we'd unloaded.

You could harbor a man in your bed or your body, play on his nervous system like Paderewski at the keyboard, and not shift his brain one inch out of the concrete of dogma. (p. 5)

Wheels within wheels was another of Minna's phrases, used exclusively to sneer at our notions of coincidence or conspiracy. If we boys ever dabbled in astonishment at, say, his running into three girls he knew from high school in a row on Court Street, two of whom he'd dated behind each other's backs, he'd bug his eyes and intone, wheels within wheels. No met had ever pitched a no-hitter, but Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan both pitched them after being traded away---wheels within wheels.

I'm forever writing around a void—I guess I don't have to explain to you why that is.

The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism.

Hospital" turned out to represent a punctuated tedium, the recurrence of blood pressure and temperature checks, the placement and emptying of bedpans and painful switching of IV lines from the crook of one elbow to the other, and the switching of nurses as day and night were destroyed and replaced with tripartite shifts.

Anonymous, where among the hard-bitten, laid-off-lathe-operator

You can't be deep without a surface.