{"author":"Jonathan Lethem","author_id":"Jonathan+Lethem","total_quotes":21,"quotes":[{"text":"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.","author":"Jonathan Lethem","tags":["116","school"],"id":2618,"author_id":"Jonathan+Lethem"},{"text":"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 twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant six hundred and twenty-five slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies.","author":"Jonathan Lethem","tags":["life","writing"],"id":8709,"author_id":"Jonathan+Lethem"},{"text":"As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have made substantial amounts of money for one another.","author":"Jonathan Lethem","tags":["friendship"],"id":16848,"author_id":"Jonathan+Lethem"},{"text":"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.","author":"Jonathan Lethem","tags":["brooklyn","enduring","grubby","self"],"id":18518,"author_id":"Jonathan+Lethem"},{"text":"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.","author":"Jonathan Lethem","tags":["60","autumn","school","summer"],"id":23863,"author_id":"Jonathan+Lethem"},{"text":"You could harbor a man in your bed or your body, play on his nervous system like Paderewski at the keyboard, and not shift his brain one inch out of the concrete of dogma. (p. 5).","author":"Jonathan Lethem","tags":["brain","dogma","harbor"],"id":75831,"author_id":"Jonathan+Lethem"},{"text":"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 are released from the paint-by-numbers page of their schooldays, from their preformatted roles as truant or victim, freed to an unspoiled summer, that inviting medium for doodling in self-transformation. ","author":"Jonathan Lethem","tags":["151","school","summer","vacation"],"id":84878,"author_id":"Jonathan+Lethem"},{"text":"What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?","author":"Jonathan Lethem","tags":["490","racism"],"id":103649,"author_id":"Jonathan+Lethem"},{"text":"The dentist swiveled on his heels and disappeared, leaving me there to massage my jaw back into feeling after its brief, masochistic marriage to the top of my wooden desk.","author":"Jonathan Lethem","tags":["detective-noir","sci-fi"],"id":105736,"author_id":"Jonathan+Lethem"},{"text":"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.","author":"Jonathan Lethem","tags":["247","insomnia","sleep","tourette-s"],"id":112396,"author_id":"Jonathan+Lethem"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":21,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}