What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.
Jonathan LethemRead
Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote explores the complexities of insomnia, illustrating how an active mind struggles with its thoughts even when the world sleeps.
Jonathan Lethem's quote delves into the nature of insomnia, portraying it as a condition where the mind remains hyperactive, unable to find peace as the world around it rests. It likens the insomniac's relentless thinking to a conspiracy theorist's mindset, suggesting that their racing thoughts create a false sense of importance, as if their vigilance is crucial to preventing calamity in an indifferent world. This reflects a deeper philosophical inquiry into the relationship between awareness, anxiety, and the passage of time.
Themes
InsomniaMindAnxietyThoughtsRestlessness
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared during a discussion about mental health at a seminar.
More from Jonathan Lethem
All quotes →I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
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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.
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I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.
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It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.
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I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction - I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following time's arrow, I keep myself sane.
Jonathan LethemRead
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