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.”
“My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.”
“My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.”
“I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.”
“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.”
“I am relaxed. It's just buried under layers of incredulity and panic. But underneath those I'm very relaxed.”
“This kiss would be with me, invisible badge or scar, when I went back to the apartment.”
“She was his great adventure; his love for her had taken him places he'd never dreamed of going.”
“I don’t know what surprised me more: the part where Chase completely gave us away, the part where he got mad at his dad, or the part where he called me his friend.”
“Being happy means you've decided to accept the imperfections and get on with it anyway.”
“I love her more than I actually express in words—an irony for a writer—and am every day genuinely amazed I get to spend my life with her.”
“For centuries, pilgrims have travelled to Ayodhya identifying it as the birthplace of Ram. But the exact location of the birthplace of Ram, in Ayodhya, is the subject of great dispute and political turmoil in India. Ever since colonial times, Hinduism has felt under siege, forced to explain itself using European templates, make itself more tangible, more concrete, more structured, more homogeneous, more historical, more geographical, less psychological, less emotional, to render itself as valid as the major religions of the Eurocentric world like Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The fallout of this pressure is the need to locate matters of faith in a particular spot. The timeless thus becomes time-bound and the universal becomes particular. What used to once be a matter of faith becomes a territorial war zone where courts now have to intervene. Everyone wants to be right in a world where adjustment, allowance, accommodation and affection are seen as signs of weakness, even corruption.”
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