A Gambler's Anatomy Quotes

“blow the sixty bucks on a movie on Shattuck, on a bucket of fake-buttered popcorn and a shoe-box-size carton of Whoppers or Junior Mints. Cradling the bucket or carton he’d slip into the darkness, washed over by the phantasms of some sex comedy played by American actors a quarter-century younger than himself, who were meant to be taken for adults. This would make it permissible to die. Desirable, even.”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“Or were they bound in slow-cooking love-hate, a folie à deux obscure to anyone outside their secret system?”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“Flirtation, so effortlessly accomplished. Mention of the train had done it. Train unspecified; they both knew which. They’d ridden together and now shared the ferry, and though a thousand identical to her might have strolled past his Charlottenburg café window in two weeks, the shared destination worked its paltry magic. And both tall. This little was enough to excuse lust as destiny.”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“A simple, elegant game. Like riding a bicycle, once you’ve learned you can hardly fail to pick it up again, that is unless the brakes are out of order.”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“Cocaine Suppe Mit Tittenschnakken,”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“As Bruno neared, Stolarsky stepped from behind the door. His feet and legs were bare. He held a pistol, loosely, and wore nothing but a thin T-shirt. The darkness beneath its hem revealed as a scribble of genitals and hair, his penis like a second sarcastic nose.”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“The house on The Crescent, stepped into the hillside, had no face. In”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“On Telegraph, she stopped him in front of Walgreens, put the sack into his hands, a finger to her lips. “I’ll come back.” He was left to contemplate the sidewalk, full of listless earring vendors ready with their piercing guns.”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“Baader-Meinhof Gruppe, they are called also.” “Yes.”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“Not everything needed to rise to converge: It could just drift together into the indiscernible middle, and bewilder you.”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“His ironies were ghoulish now.”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“The lowliest European functionary—a border inspector, say—dressed immaculately, and furnished even a cubicle to lend an impression of respectability. A truly wealthy man, like Stolarsky, pronounced his status in paneling, burnished wood, fountain pens, leather volumes. Bruno banished the despondent thought; this baleful room was Europe’s nullification. “What’s the matter, I trample on your delicate sensibilities?”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“Her presence was sturdy and watery at once, arms weirdly muscled, nipples like small tongues riding on the mercurial flesh that glided on his surface, thighs smooth to where his fingers plummeted inside, followed by the rest of him. The golf-ball cyst swam too, faintly present against him, a feature, not a bug. Tira, for all her usual chatter, wasn’t a screamer or even a moaner. In the silence their breaths fell into concert with the whining Murphy springs. Bruno’s mind felt poured into hers as well, at least conveyed a great distance out of his body. The”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“Each might have been a week except for night’s failure to come and close the deal. When”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“The morning’s light danced on the spine of the new bridge, which towered like the guts of a cosmic piano. The same light that agitated the picture windows of the gaudy homes tumbled so recklessly into the seams of the Oakland hills. The”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“Hospital” turned out to represent a punctuated tedium, the recurrence of blood pressure and temperature checks, the placement and emptying of bedpans and painful switching of IV lines from the crook of one elbow to the other, and the switching of nurses as day and night were destroyed and replaced with tripartite shifts.”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“First, however, and feeling real excitement at the thought, the good burst of adrenaline at last, Behringer wanted to dismantle the sockets and loosen his patient’s eyes. Behringer”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“Bruno’s brain might have parachuted somewhere over the Atlantic.”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“I am exiting the wider world, to return to my homeland of bullying, psychosis, and bad taste. Forgive me. It is a medical matter. Once”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“Open duh computer.” Germans ought to farm out all positions of petty authority. The accent remained too full of implication.”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“exemplified the dull rigidity of Singapore’s old colonial fantasies about itself.”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“Minutes died serially into hours. Bruno”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy

“The clacking of the checkers on the hardwood points was the music of honest thought, resounding in silence as it navigated the fortunes told by the pips on the dice.”
― Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler's Anatomy