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
Listen to me. I’m shy. I’m not stupid. I can’t meet people’s eyes. I don’t know if you understand what that’s like. There’s a whole world going on around me, I’m aware of that. It’s not because I don’t want to look at you, Lucinda. It’s that I don’t want to be seen.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote expresses the struggle of a shy person who feels overwhelmed by social interactions.
In this quote, the speaker shares their internal experience of shyness, highlighting the difference between a desire to connect and the fear of being vulnerable. It emphasizes that shyness is not a lack of intelligence or desire to engage; rather, it is an emotional barrier that complicates interactions with others, signaling a deeper introspection and self-awareness amidst the chaos of social life.
Themes
ShynessRelationshipsVulnerabilityConnectionEmotions
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about overcoming personal barriers, one might use this quote to illustrate the complexity of shyness.
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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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.
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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.
Jonathan LethemRead
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.
Jonathan LethemRead
It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.
Jonathan LethemRead
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