Jonathan Lethem Quotes

September is my favourite month, particularly in Cornwall. I felt, even as a child, that if you get a wonderful day in September, you think: 'This could be one of the last, the summer is nearly over.' If you get a wonderful day in May, you think: 'So what, there's more coming.'

I think I would like to be in Victorian times. Small town. Bandstands. Summer. That kind of thing. Without disease.

Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.

And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the power, as she came tinkling, rustling, still had the power as she came across the room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky.

Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.

And there, row upon row, with the soft gleam of flowers opened at morning, with the light of this June sun glowing through a faint skin of dust, would stand the dandelion wine. Peer through it at the wintry day - the snow melted to grass, the trees were reinhabitated with bird, leaf, and blossoms like a continent of butterflies breathing on the wind. And peering through, color sky from iron to blue. Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in

I had a bag of Fritos, they were Texas grilled Fritos. These Fritos had grill marks on them. They remind me of summer, when we used to fire up the barbeque and throw down some Fritos. I can still see my dad with the apron on. Better flip that Frito, dad, you know how I like it.

Summertime, I think, is a collective unconscious. We all remember the notes that made up the song of the ice cream man; we all know what it feels like to brand our thighs on a playground slide that's heated up like a knife in a fire; we all have lain on our backs with our eyes closed and our hearts beating across the surface of our lids, hoping that this day will stretch just a little longer than the last one, when in fact it's all going in the other direction.

It’s weird to think the place where we’re standing will only be a point in the sky.

I come from way north. We'd listen to radio shows all the time. I think I was the last generation, or pretty close to the last one, that grew up without TV.

Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels. Looking back at the years gone by like so many summer fields.

The past--the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember.

Four ducks on a pond, / A grass-bank beyond, / A blue sky of spring, / White clouds on the wing: / What a little thing / To remember for years - / To remember with tears!.

When I was a young kid, almost every other show on television was a Western. And some of them were part of my childhood, I loved them. Like, Rifle Man, I absolutely adored. So, I think everything comes in a cycle.

Ultima came to stay with us the summer I was almost seven. When she came the beauty of the llano unfolded before my eyes, and the gurgling waters of the river sang to the hum of the turning earth. The magical time of childhood stood still, and the pulse of the living earth pressed its mystery into my living blood.

It's just people who grew up in that time are suddenly old enough to be creators themselves, but I think they have a little perspective. I'm 40 now, and I have children of my own. Before I forget my own childhood completely, I want to take some time to take a look at the '80s and think back.

a cloud-congested caul that is alternately red, orange, vermilion, purple. Sometimes the clouds break apart in great, slow rafts, letting through beams of innocent yellow sunlight that are bitterly nostalgic for the summer that has gone by.

The summer has seized you, as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw lemons as large as your desk-side globe-that miniature map of the world-and I could mention, too, the market stalls of mushrooms and garlic bugs all engorged. Or I even think of the orchard next door, where the berries are done and the apples are beginning to swell. And once, with our first backyard,I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans we couldn't eat.

Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way-and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.

The last time I put on this uniform (Cincinnati), I think I was eight, for a father-son game.

In our imaginations the adults of our childhood remain extreme, essential - we might say radical since they are the roots that fed luxuriant later systems. Those first bohemians, for instance, stay operatic in memory even though were we to meet them today - well, what would we think, we who've elaborated our eccentricities with a patience, a professionalism they never knew?

I loved [fairy stories] so, and my mother weighed down by grief had given up telling me them. At Nohant I found Mmes. d'Ardony's and Perrault's tales in old editions which became my chief joy for five or six years ... I've never read them since, but I could tell each tale straight through, and I don't think anything in all one's intellecutal life can be compared to these delights of imagination.

You know when you're a kid and you think, 'Oh no, I've got double math, this is never gonna end,' but then it ends, and it's like it never happened? That's like life.

Men... look back on the children who were once themselves, and attempt to reconstruct them. But they can no longer think like the child.