“ He was permanently impressed by the most irrelevant banalities and impossible to impress with real novelty, meaning, or conflict. And he was too moronic to be properly self-loathing--so it was my duty… Jonathan Lethem
“ Her fiercest sincerities were translated by the male ego, on arrival, into daffy flirtation. (p. 24) Jonathan Lethem
“ Notes? Kromer was a hinge between worlds, a glimpser. All he had to offer them was his own notes, not the world itself. This situation he couldn’t make understood. Jonathan Lethem
“ His recording career spans just a decade: Rude was silenced by drug abuse and domestic tragedy at the end of the '70s. Jonathan Lethem
“ I)t was by Cicero's attainments that that he'd gained special witness to the liberals' adjustment to a brush with equality. Jonathan Lethem
“ The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or inspection or merely to watching a little less television. The voices of Barrett Rude Jr. a… Jonathan Lethem
“ A wizard salesman, Kromer switched on and demonstrated the range of speeds on any number of devices with a shame-dissolving forthrightness. At those moments, he thought of himself as a Conceptual Lesb… Jonathan Lethem
“ 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 b… Jonathan Lethem
“ Grips slipped. Hers had from every surface. She's shaped nothing after all, only been crushed and reshaped. No wonder she felt for the brownstones, the cripples, now filling chaotically with no regard… Jonathan Lethem
“ She reassembled her deranged silent treatment of the whole of the twentieth century, but it quit before she could fire it. Jonathan Lethem
“ Eighth grade's a distant rumor, a tabled issue, and Dylan knows from experience that the summer between might change anything, everything. He and Mingus Rude too and even Arthur Lomb for that matter a… Jonathan Lethem
“ By trying to export myself into a place that didn't fully exist I asked works of art to bear my expectation that they could be better than life, that they could redeem life. In fact, I believe they ar… Jonathan Lethem
“ Astrology fell into the class of a ...and not worth the efforts of the debunking engine Cicero had been born with in place of a brain. Cicero's capacities were reserved for lies that mattered. Ideolog… Jonathan Lethem
“ They were drones, men costumed in independent thought who'd become slaves of party groupspeak. (p. 4) 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… Jonathan Lethem
“ The world was ersatz and actual, forged and faked, by ourselves and unseen others. Daring to attempt to absolutely sort fake from real was a folly that would call down tigers or hiccups to cure us of… Jonathan Lethem
“ Today the tower's flock, the usual birds, flew in a kind of scatter pattern, their paths intricately chaotic, the bunch parting and interweaving like boiling pasta under a pot's lifted lid. It appeare… Jonathan Lethem
