Dissident Gardens Quotes

“You discovered yourself and what really mattered only after you passed through the lens of the fairy tale, imposed on every human female and male alike, that someone existed out in the forest of the world for you to love and marry.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens

“(I)t was by Cicero's attainments that that he'd gained special witness to the liberals' adjustment to a brush with actual equality.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens

“Astrology fell into the class of a fake lie...and not worth the efforts of the debunking engine Cicero had been born with in place of a brain. Cicero's capacities were reserved for lies that mattered. Ideology, though that word was yet unknown to him: the veil of sustaining fiction that drove the world, what people needed to believe. This, Cicero wished to unmask and unmake, decry and destroy. (p. 65)”
― Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens

“Her fiercest sincerities were translated by the male ego, on arrival, into daffy flirtation. (p. 24)”
― Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens

“The whole state of Maine is unlocked.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens

“For Cicero, censure of a blatant racist or homophobe was not only useless but fatally boring. The power residing in such accusations was best wielded at random, against the most avowedly sympathetic and correct colleague or student. Cicero routinely dropped a casual “But of course, you realize you’re a racist” into friendly interactions. The less evidence on hand, the more destabilizing the result.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens

“She reassembled her deranged silent treatment of the whole of the twentieth century, but it quit before she could fire it.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens

“Let him get stoned, since everybody must.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens

“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)”
― Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens

“They were drones, men costumed in independent thought who'd become slaves of party groupspeak. (p. 4)”
― Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens