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16341a1
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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
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proverbs
paranoia
questions
wit
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Thomas Pynchon |
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2ce928c
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Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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06942bc
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They're in love. Fuck the war.
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war
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Thomas Pynchon |
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a43c7e7
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It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.
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death
life
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Thomas Pynchon |
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031c8d9
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I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy." Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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ce71f79
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Keep cool but care
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v
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Thomas Pynchon |
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7085dbc
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Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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11608b6
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A screaming comes across the sky.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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afffc40
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I am the twentieth century. I am the ragtime and the tango; sans-serif, clean geometry. I am the virgin's-hair whip and the cunningly detailed shackles of decadent passion. I am every lonely railway station in every capital of Europe. I am the Street, the fanciless buildings of government. the cafe-dansant, the clockwork figure, the jazz saxophone, the tourist-lady's hairpiece, the fairy's rubber breasts, the travelling clock which always t..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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19099e4
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The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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857e399
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Dream tonight of peacock tails, Diamond fields and spouter whales. Ills are many, blessings few, But dreams tonight will shelter you. Let the vampire's creaking wing Hide the stars while banshees sing; Let the ghouls gorge all night long; Dreams will keep you safe and strong. Skeletons with poison teeth, Risen from the world beneath, Ogre, troll, and loup-garou, Bloody wraith who looks like you, Shadow on the window shade, Harpies in a midn..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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264469c
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There is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made - at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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18aed3a
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Shall I project a world?
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Thomas Pynchon |
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eecf49e
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Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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00bcb1a
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All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.
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freedom
destiny
elite
tyranny
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Thomas Pynchon |
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a9e4322
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What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove's difference and the universe can be on into a whole 'nother song.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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a58af0d
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You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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3279b62
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There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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f362d85
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Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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1d1d4bc
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If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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e7db5ad
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It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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76fcd1c
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Don't forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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b63fb8f
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What, I should only trust good people? Man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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e533062
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Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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8331eb7
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Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no "moments of truth." It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which thenselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one's own unanswered."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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4d26c49
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Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines o..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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c5bec4c
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She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as 'pretty'...but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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6f2f802
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Danger's over, Banana Breakfast is saved.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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c41ce4c
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For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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cc42561
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Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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0c724c0
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Let the peace of this day be here tomorrow when I wake up.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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510317b
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So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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9259283
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Kekule dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increas..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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1d60375
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To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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be111cc
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I dream that I have found us both again, With spring so many strangers' lives away, And we, so free, Out walking by the sea, With someone else's paper words to say.... They took us at the gates of green return, Too lost by then to stop, and ask them why- Do children meet again? Does any trace remain, Along the superhighways of July?
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Thomas Pynchon |
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8f38f03
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He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.
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nostalgia
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Thomas Pynchon |
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b116ae3
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There is a theory going around that the U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the group known as the Illuminati. It is difficult to look for long at the strange single eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the story, a little. Too many anarchists in 19th-century Europe--Bakunin, Proudhon, Salverio Friscia--were Masons for it to be pure chance. Lovers of ..
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freemasonry
conspiracy
illuminati
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Thomas Pynchon |
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9140e21
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But with a sigh he had released her hand, while she was so lost in the fantasy that she hadn't felt it go away, as if he'd known the best moment to let go.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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abad28a
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The rest of us, not chosen for enlightenment, left on the outside of Earth, at the mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to detect and measure, must go on blundering inside our front-brain faith in Kute Korrespondences, hoping that for each psi-synthetic taken from Earth's soul there is a molecule, secular, more or less ordinary and named, over here - kicking endlessly among the plastic trivia, finding in each Deeper Significan..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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826bab5
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Next worst thing to unrequited Love, isn't it? Insufficient hate.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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0b8f389
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yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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3473986
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Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs--what were the chances of finding anyone else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it?
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science
humor
inspirational
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Thomas Pynchon |
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c3ccf4e
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Darkness invades the dreams of the glassblower. Of all the unpleasantries his dreams grab in out of the night air, an extinguished light is the worst. Light in his dreams, was always hope: the basic moral hope. As the contacts break helically away, hope turns to darkness, and the glassblower wakes sharply tonight crying, Who? Who?
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Thomas Pynchon |
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a733b7f
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Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof, or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which had come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any con..
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Thomas Pynchon |