Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude (2003)

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

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

Jonathan Lethem