Jonathan Lethem · 224 pages
Rating: (4.6K votes)
“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.”
― Jonathan Lethem, quote from As She Climbed Across the Table
“My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.”
― Jonathan Lethem, quote from As She Climbed Across the Table
“My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.”
― Jonathan Lethem, quote from As She Climbed Across the Table
“I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.”
― Jonathan Lethem, quote from As She Climbed Across the Table
“The speaker was stringy and angular, his blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, his plaid workman's shirtsleeves rolled up around his pale biceps. Journalism major, I guessed.”
― Jonathan Lethem, quote from As She Climbed Across the Table
“I am relaxed. It's just buried under layers of incredulity and panic. But underneath those I'm very relaxed.”
― Jonathan Lethem, quote from As She Climbed Across the Table
“This kiss would be with me, invisible badge or scar, when I went back to the apartment.”
― Jonathan Lethem, quote from As She Climbed Across the Table
“The principle suffering of the poor is shame and disgrace. It is a toxic shame -- a global sense of failure of the whole self. This shame can seep so deep down... To this end, one hopes (against all human inclination) to model not the "one false move" God but the "no matter whatness" of God. You seek to imitate the kind of God you believe in, where disappointment is, well, Greek to Him. You strive to live the black spiritual that says, "God looks beyond our fault and sees our need.”
― Gregory Boyle, quote from Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
“...because in a way it happened to someone else. I don't really speak that person's language anymore, and when I think about her, she embarrasses me sometimes, but I don't want to forget her, I don't want to pretend she never existed. So before I start forgetting, I have to get down exactly who she was, and exactly how she felt about everything. She was me a lot longer than I've been me so far.”
― Peter S. Beagle, quote from Tamsin
“It brings joy in sorrow, victory in battle, light to darkness, life to the dead. That is the power of the blood-red jewel which men honor with the name "The Philosopher's Stone.”
― Hiromu Arakawa, quote from Fullmetal Alchemist, Vol. 3
“Then like gravity, or maybe like magnets, our lips met again because they had to. And in that touch it felt like I was buried treasure he’d crossed seven seas to claim. I couldn’t feel the edges of my own body anymore; I was melting into his.”
― Cidney Swanson, quote from Rippler
“I am the defense early warning radar system
I see nothing but bombs”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Kaddish and Other Poems
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