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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
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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.
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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
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It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.
Jonathan Lethem
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To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions.
Jonathan Lethem
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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
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Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.
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There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.
Jonathan Lethem
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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
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My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.
Jonathan Lethem
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Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.
Jonathan Lethem
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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
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I jotted the name down mentally on that tattered notepad I call a memory. The pen skipped.
Jonathan Lethem
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Tourette's is just one big lifetime of tag, really. The world (or my brain — same thing) appoints me it, again and again. So I tag back. Can it do otherwise? If you've ever been it you know the answer.
Jonathan Lethem
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Jonathan Lethem
Creative Commons
Born:
February 19, 1964
(age 60)
Bio:
Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994.
Known for:
The Fortress of Solitude (2003)
Motherless Brooklyn (1999)
Dissident Gardens (2013)
Chronic City (2009)
Gun, with Occasional Music (1994)
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