Quotes of Jonathan Lethem - somelinesforyou

“ This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentences—nothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn’t rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences: “Esther’s cleavage is something to be noticed” or “You can’t have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture” or “I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves as taste but is in fact nothing of the sort” or “I said I want my eggs scrambled not destroyed.” At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we’d rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twentyfive times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twentyfive times and then slice each page into twentyfive slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant six hundred and twentyfive slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies. ”

- Jonathan Lethem

“ For those whose ganglia were formed preTV, the mimetic deployment of popculture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside. ”

- Jonathan Lethem

“ In the sea of words, the in print is foam, surf bubbles riding the top. And it's a dark sea, and deep, where divers need lights on their helmets and would perish at the lower depths. ”

- Jonathan Lethem
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