Jonathan Lethem Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.

Jonathan Lethem
You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.

Jonathan Lethem
Like a match struck in a darkened room: Two white girls in flannel nightgowns and red vinyl roller skates with white laces, tracing tentative circles on a cracked blue slate sidewalk at seven o'clock on an evening in July.

Jonathan Lethem
I'd underestimated him. I assumed anyone who started out gut-punching you in an elevator couldn't have all that much else in his arsenal. For instance, I had no idea he could smile, let alone at such an inappropriate time.

Jonathan Lethem
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
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
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
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
The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time *isn't*.

Jonathan Lethem
I'd forgotten my identity as the world's most pathetic superhero, become a Californian instead.

Jonathan Lethem
Anyway, it struck me now in a different light, as being yet another bit of personal meaning which had been taken from me, stripped off like clothes I'd only borrowed or stolen. I had maybe the least persuasive case for self-pity of any human soul on the planet. Or anyway, the most hilarious.

Jonathan Lethem
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
What exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?

Jonathan Lethem
Fifth grade was fourth grade with something wrong. Nothing changed outright. Instead it teetered.

Jonathan Lethem
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,

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

Jonathan Lethem
I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.

Jonathan Lethem
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
Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.

Jonathan Lethem
Nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man.

Jonathan Lethem
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
Apologies aren't something you want to get in the habit of practicing in the mirror

Jonathan Lethem
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
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
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
It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.

Jonathan Lethem
To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions.

Jonathan Lethem