The Fortress of Solitude Quotes

“What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“Dylan's friend Linus Millberg appears out of the crowd with a cup of beer and shouts, 'Dorothy is John Lennon, the Scarecrow is Paul McCartney, the Tin Woodman is George Harrison, the Lion's Ringo.'
'Star Trek,' commands Dylan over the lousy twangy country CB's is playing between sets.
'Easy,' Linus shouts back. "Kirk's John, Spock's Paul, Bones is George, Scotty is Ringo. Or Chekov, after the first season. Doesn't matter, it's like a Scotty-Chekov-combination Ringo. Spare parts are always surplus Georges or Ringos.'
'But isn't Spock-lacks-a-heart and McCoy-lacks-a-brain like Woodman and Scarecrow? So Dorothy's Kirk?'
'You don't get it. That's just a superficial coincidence. The Beatle thing is an archetype, it's like the basic human formation. Everything naturally forms into a Beatles, people can't help it.'
'Say the types again.'
'Responsible-parent genius-parent genius-child clown-child.'
'Okay, do Star Wars.'
'Luke Paul, Han Solo John, Chewbacca George, the robots Ringo.'
'Tonight Show.'
'Uh, Johnny Carson Paul, the guest John, Ed McMahon Ringo, whatisname George.'
'Doc Severinson.'
'Yeah, right. See, everything revolves around John, even Paul. That's why John's the guest.'
'And Severinson's quiet but talented, like a Wookie.'
'You begin to understand.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“Anyone could see it all coming and no one could possibly stop it and that was the beautiful thing. Friday night was open wide and writ in stone”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or inspection or merely to watching a little less television. The voices of Barrett Rude Jr. and the Subtle Distinctions lead nowhere, though, if not back to your own neighborhood. To the street where you live. To things you left behind.
And that's what you need, what you needed all along.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“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. ”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“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.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“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.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“But the stories you told yourself-- which you pretended to recall as if they'd happened every afternoon of an infinite summer-- were really a pocketful of days distorted into legend, another jailhouse exaggeration, like the dimensions of those ballpoint-crosshatched tits or of the purported mountains of blow you once used to enjoy, or how you'd bellowed an avenger's roar when you squeezed the trigger of a pistol you'd actually brandished in self-pissing terror. How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned a few afternoons long, in the end.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“Fifth grade was fourth grade with something wrong. Nothing changed outright. Instead it teetered. You'd pushed futility at Public School 38 so long by then you expected the building itself would be embarrassed and quit. The ones who couldn't read still couldn't, the teachers were teaching the same thing for the fifth time now and refusing to meet your eyes, some kids had been left back twice and were the size of janitors. The place was a cage for growing, nothing else. School lunch turned out to be the five-year-plan, the going concern. You couldn't be left back from fish sticks and sloppy joes. You'd retain at the least two thousand half-pint containers of vitamin D-enriched chocolate milk.
Two black guys from the projects, twins, were actually named Ronald and Donald MacDonald. The twins themselves only shrugged, couldn't be made to agree it was incredible.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time *isn't*.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“Dylan never met anyone who wasn't about to change immediately into someone else. His was a special talent for encountering persons about to shed one identity or disguise for another.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“We were in a middle space then, in a cone of white, father and son moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“The cars rushing below knew nothing. People in cars weren't New Yorkers anyway, they'd suffered some basic misunderstanding. The two boys on the walkway, apparently standing still they were moving faster than the cars.
Nineteen seventy-five.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“When I was a boy I used to love pizza, and whenever my father took me to the pizzeria I'd order two slices. And I'd sit and he'd watch me wolfing down the first slice with my eyes on the second. I wasn't even tasting that first slice. And one day my father said to me, "Son, you need to learn that while you're eating the first slice of pizza, eat the first slice. Because right now you're eating the second slice before you've finished the first.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“Everyone's body betrayed them in different ways, it was all forgiven and never discussed.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“Everything funny in a not-funny-at-all kind of way. Sarcasm as something you practiced like karate. Later concealing your mute fury when nobody fed you the opening lines.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“Winter days were static glimpsed between channel flips.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“I’d forgotten my identity as the world’s most pathetic superhero, become a Californian instead. ”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“Anyway, it struck me now in a different light, as being yet another bit of personal meaning which had ben taken from me, stripped off like clothes I'd only borrowed or stolen. I had maybe the least persuasive case for self-pity of any human soul on the planet. Or anyway, the most hilarious.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“Did he ever--try?'
Mingus shrugged. 'He was like you.'
What's that mean?'
Means he tried.'
Of course. The ring was not a neutral tool. It judged its wearer: Aaron Doily flew drunkenly, and Dylan flew like a coward, only when it didn't matter, at the Windles' pond. So if had attuned to Robert Woolfolk's chaos.
Don't tell me,' said Dylan. 'He flew sideways.'
Mingus left it vague. He'd always made it his habit to protect their honor against one another--Dylan, Arthur, Robert. To say nothing.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“The desires our little family couldn't afford to indulge had never seemed important, only snobbish and silly and somehow misplaced, like Thurston Howell's priorities on Gilligan's Island. Besides, I'd had as much or more money than most kids I'd known in Brooklyn, if somewhat less than the majority of my Manhattan schoolmates at Stuyvesant, so figured I was somewhere in the middle. Yeah, sure, that was it: I was middle class.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“The restaurant, Bongiorno's, was bad and didn't know it. Everything was presented with a passive-aggressive flourish, as though we probably weren't savvy enough to appreciate the oregano-heavy garlic bread, the individual bowls for olive pits, the starched napkins stuffed into our wineglasses, or the waiter's strained enunciation of a long list of specials.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“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.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“Grips slipped. Hers had from every surface. She's shaped nothing after all, only been crushed and reshaped. No wonder she felt for the brownstones, the cripples, now filling chaotically with no regard for her plan.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“Destroy the traces. I’d never tried to do that. Instead I’d lived in their midst for thirty years, oblivious, a blind man fancying himself invisible.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“I suppose there was never a reason for tearing down a cabin or scrapping a stopped automobile, if you had all those acres.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or introspection or merely to watching a little less television.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“Nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man. ”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude