278 Quotes by 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.

If. If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan's pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, then summer wouldn't give way to whatever came after. If. If. Fat chance. Summer on Dean Street had lasted one day and that day was over, it was dark out, had been for hours. The Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock read nine-thirty in red-and-blue neon. Final score, a million to nothing. The million-dollar kid.Your school wasn't on fire, you were.

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?

I’m forever writing around a void—I guess I don’t have to explain to you why that is.

Enough of this. Does every conversation with you have to be the director's cut? Get out of the car.

Agli inizi della carriera ero così fesso da credere che il lavoro consistesse nell'individuare un colpevole tra la massa degli innocenti. In realtà si tratta casomai di trovare uno o due innocenti che meritano di essere salvati in mezzo alla massa dei cattivi.

(I)t was by Cicero's attainments that that he'd gained special witness to the liberals' adjustment to a brush with actual equality.

Develop your pawns or Hulk will smash.

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.