The Arrest Quotes

“This was before cell phones. The desolate spaciousness between humans, between human moments, not yet filled in with chattering ghosts of reassurance. You could hear yourself not think.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest

“THE OLD GROWTH, THE MAPLES, turned first. They rusted one leaf at a time, where ocean breezes bruised them, late in August. Paulo, the tree warden, once told Journeyman that the first trees to change reveal a map of damage. The earliest turning were those once sickened or lightning-struck. So Journeyman saw the season as a theater of succumbing. The wind’s bite called each tree to solidarity with the weakest. Only the evergreens were refuseniks. Primordial trees, dinosaur trees—in their gummy hearts, they were deader than the trees that turned.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest

“They were tired of the old stories, those birds. They wished to hear new ones.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest

“And the sculptor Laird Noteless’s catastrophic urban earthwork, the notorious “fjord” he’d excavated into a Harlem hillside, into which New Yorkers had pitched their garbage and sometimes their suicidal bodies.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest

“Journeyman felt obscurely humiliated.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest

“They might themselves be the fairies they’d been waiting for.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest

“It was a toy engineered to beguile the user—the punter—into paying for the privilege of suicide.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest

“bludgeoned to silence by Todbaum’s Rube Goldberg allusions. All were melted into worthless slag by the time he’d finished with them.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest

“His readiness to surrender his exoskeleton, become a bare forked root again.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest

“Earth Abides, Dr. Bloodmoney, Station Eleven, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Riddley Walker,”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest

“I never met one single line worth drawing, my man, only crossing.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest

“the self is some kind of ineradicable essence?” “Keep it simple, stupid. The lesson is we’re all dumb destructive monkeys in the dark.” Kormentz’s”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest

“It’s a vacancy. You can decorate it with distinctive stuff. Neurosis. Like a fingerprint or a snowflake, no two alike. But that’s like tattoos on an arm. What do they call it, a ‘sleeve tattoo’? You can embroider the whole damn container. Beneath the decoration, a nullity. Like outer space, mostly dark stuff.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest

“Everyone’s secrets are the same.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest

“The self’s a howling counterfeit, an arena where no show goes on, a parenthesis with nothing inside.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest

“Journeyman was returned to himself, to the scouring bankruptcy of the late afternoon.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest

“How did one human undesolate another? If you’d never seen it done, you wouldn’t believe it possible.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest

“Basically every two-bit libertarian, free-range asshole you'll ever meet is just waiting for someone to talk them in default cop.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest