MEMBERS

[...] I've acquired another paperback copy of Ralph Warden Meeker's Obsitinate Dust. Though it's hardly easy going, I'm doing my best to push through to the finish line [...]. Once in a while on the underground trains I look up and see another rider with a copy of Meeker's bulky masterpiece in his hands, and we share a sly collegial smile, like fellow members of some terrorist cell.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

THE ISLAND

So I'd exiled myself from society, shunning that artificial island. It made me who I was, the act of not going there. [...] Somehow I was patient enough to have another island in mind for me.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

I-T

Now that we were safely out of hospitals and jail cells and subterranean trains I could admire the night's supreme reduced stillness, the storm now just dotting the i's and crossing the t's of its masterpiece.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

TRASH THE ORIGINAL

"Each memory is only a photocopy of the previous, rather than referring back to some stored 'original'. We trash the original, like some theatrical troupe that always tears up its script and bases their performance on a transcript of the night before, complete with mistakes and improvs, then destroys that script too, and so on. [...]"
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

MMM

I mix my metaphors so I know I'm alive. I mix metaphors, I fall down, no problem.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

FIRST

[...] Oona, my idea of first thing in the morning.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

GOOD?

The good times are killing me.
(Modest Mouse | Good News For People Who Loves Bad News)

SANTA TERRA

As is, come to think of it, terra! But we believe in mythical things, here, like Earth and Santa. After all, we have invisible enemies - CO2, cancer, gravity. So heck, why not invisible friends?
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

OH MY LEAR

Sure, sure, I was always mistaken. To be so was my great role, my Lear.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

YEARS

Years were all she had.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

RESOLUTELY

The invisible are always so resolutely invisible, until you see them.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

TAD MELANCHOLY

Then came the weird pervasive chocolate smell that floated like a cloud over Manhattan. At first you thought it was local, you'd passed an unseen backery, smelled something wafting, chocolate sweet, stirring cravings and memories both. You'd scan the area, find nothing, continue on, but the smell was with you everywhere, with you in your apartament, too, though the windows were tight. On the street again, you'd see others glancing up, sniffing air, bemused. And soon confirming: yes, they smelled the same thing. It had been downtown, too, someone said, quite nervously. Another said even in the subway. Lexington Avenue sidewalks, normally muffled in regular hostility, broke out suddenly in Willy Wonka comparisons, one passerby saiyng, I thought of a sundae, another replying, No, syrup on crepes. Or, a tad melancholy: I haven't wanted ice cream like this in forty years.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

TRIMMED

If I'm ever trimmed so precisely around the curve of my ear let me die in my sleep. Let the eagles pluck out my eyes.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

VACUUM

Probably everyone feels this way. My distinction (if there is one) lies in the helpless and immersive extent of my empathy. I'm truly a vacuum filled by the folks I'm with, and vapidly neutral in their absence.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

OONA/NO ONE

I wanted Oona in the morning. I could still conjure her slippery smoothness in my arms (and divergent cuppable breasts in my palms, where they left ghost trails of peach's weight), but Oona had kept dunning lights and pulling courtains, and dressing and undressing stealthly, while I was at the sink or refrigerator, or asleep. When I asked, Oona informed me she was too skinny to look at. She might even be invisible, she joked. After I looked clear through her I'd see there was no one there at all.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

UNEXPRESSED/INTUITED/FORBIDDEN

[...] beneath exhaustion lies a certain rage. I detect a wrongness everywhere. Within and Without, to quote a lyric. I would be misleading to say I'm screaming inside, for if I was, I'd soon enough find a way to scream aloud. Rather, the politeness infests a layer between me and myself, the name of the wrongness going not only unexpressed but unknow. Intuited only. Forbidden perhaps.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

IN SHORT

In short, some human freedom had been leveraged from view at the level of consciousness. Liberty had been narrowed, winnowed, amnesiacked.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

MISPLACED/CONSPIRED

I was startled. Did I have a secret? If I did, it was one of the things I'd misplaced in the last few years. [...] So if I had a secret, it was that I had conspired to forget my secret.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

BODILY

I have trouble believing anything exists until I know it bodily.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)