Jonathan Lethem Quotes

Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's—the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance—as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.

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.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?

Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.

You can't be deep without a surface

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.

My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.

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.

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