|
1becb9c
|
Don't commit original sin. Try and let her just be.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
2d6fbdf
|
She had been privileged to live outside of Time, to enter and leave at will, looting and manipulating, weightless, invisible. Now Time had claimed her again, put her under house arrest, taken her passport away. Only an animal with a full set of pain receptors after all.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
50f519f
|
Mason prefers to switch over to Tea, when it is Dixon's turn to begin shaking his head. "Can't understand how anyone abides that stuff." "How so?" Mason unable not to react. "Well, it's disgusting, isn't it? Half-rotted Leaves, scalded with boiling Water and then left to lie, and soak, and bloat?" "Disgusting? this is Tea, Friend, Cha,-- what all tasteful London drinks,-- that," pollicating the Coffee-Pot, "is what's disgusting." "Au contra..
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
8397caa
|
It had been dark at the beach for hours, he hadn't been smoking much and it wasn't headlights--but before she turned away, he could swear he saw light falling on her face, the orange light just after sunset that catches a face turned to the west, watching the ocean for someone to come in on the last wave of the day, in to shore and safety.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
9ef761e
|
Not everybody benefits from a misspent youth.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
79acc2a
|
Nostalgia lurks, ready to ooze from ambush.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
5927644
|
Men had it so simple. When it wasn't about Sticking It In, it was about Having The Gun, a variation that allowed them to Stick It In from a distance.
|
|
sex-and-violence
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
b01f2a0
|
When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
52633f1
|
Every mode of violent death available to Renaissance man, including a lye pit, land mines, a trained falcon with envenom'd talons, is employed. It plays, as Metzger remarked later, like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
9c8e6fb
|
it was luck, dumb luck, that had put them each where they were, and the best way to pay for any luck, however temporary, was just to be helpful when you could.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
6123957
|
American voices, country voices, high-pitched and without mercy. He lies freezing, wondering if the bedsprings will give him away. For possibly the first time he is hearing America as it must sound to a non-American. Later he will recall that what surprised him most was the fanaticism, the reliance not just on flat force but on the rightness of what they planned to do...he'd been told long ago to expect this sort of thing from Nazis, and es..
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
8b284ad
|
Yet is Dixon certain, as certain as the lightness he feels now, lightness premonitory of Flying, that far worse happen'd here, to these poor People, as the blood flew and the Children cried, - that at the end no one understood what they said as they died.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
a90bb04
|
Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "Dt" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even--as Slothrop now--what you're doing here,"
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
ba14851
|
But should Bortz have exfoliated the mere words so lushly, into such unnatural roses, under which whose red, scented dusk, dark history slithered unseen?
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
a187bac
|
Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back.
|
|
truth
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
c252518
|
It might be useful, she reminds herself, not to panic here. She imagines herself solidifying into not exactly a pillar of salt, something between that and a commemorative statue, iron and gaunt, of all the women in New York who used to annoy her standing by the curbsides "hailing a taxi," though no taxis might be visible for ten miles in any direction--nevertheless holding their hand out toward the empty street and the oncoming traffic that..
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
90c9b08
|
Do you remember, during the war, when Porky worked in a defense plant? He and Bugs Bunny. That was a good one too.
|
|
defense-plant
during-the-war
porky-pig
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
50a4a02
|
Maxine recoils, only partly out of the classic accountant's allergy to real folding money
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
e605a9a
|
Ziggy is in front of the tube, as if nothing much has been happening in his day, watching Scooby Goes Latin! (1990). Maxine after a quick visit to the bathroom to reformat, knowing better than to start in with the Q&A, comes in and sits down next to him about the time it breaks for a commercial. "Hi, Mom." She wants to enfold him forever. Instead lets him recap the plot for her. Shaggy, somehow allowed to drive the van, has become confused ..
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
3ecf4d3
|
Slung on a stage over the gunwale of an old felucca, the Peri. A storm had just passed, rushing away toward the land in a great slope of clouds; already turning yellowish from the desert. The sea there is the color of Damascus plums; and how quiet. Sun was going down; not a beautiful sunset, more a gradual darkening of the air and that storm's mountainside. The Peri had been damaged, we hove to alongside and hailed her master. No reply. Onl..
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
1cd2e2f
|
But Lord Blatherard Osmo was able at last to devote all of his time to Novi Pazar. Early in 1939, he was discovered mysteriously suffocated in a bathtub full of tapioca pudding, at the home of a Certain Viscountess. Some have seen in this the hand of the Firm.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
a911ced
|
Somebody put a Fascist Toejam cassette, 300 watts of sonic apocalypse, on to the van stereo, Isaiah gallantly handed Prairie up into the lurid fuchsia padding of this rolling orgy room, where she became indistinct among an unreadable pattern of Vomitones and their girlfriends, and quickly, in an arc unexpectedly graceful, they had all turned outward, tached up, engaged, and like a time machine departing for the future, forever too soon for ..
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
62d6ab8
|
The now-famous yearly Candlebrow Conferences, like the institution itself, were subsidized out of the vast fortune of Mr. Gideon Candlebrow of Grossdale, Illinois, who had made his bundle back during the great Lard Scandal of the '80s, in which, before Congress put an end to the practice, countless adulterated tons of that comestible were exported to Great Britain, compromising further an already debased national cuisine, giving rise throug..
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
899509f
|
Today even the dimmest of capitalist can see that the centralized nation-state, so promising an idea a generation ago, has lost all credibility with the population. Anarchism now is the idea that has seized hearts everywhere, some form of it will come to envelop every centrally governed society . . . If a nation wants to preserve itself, what other steps can it take, but mobilize and go to war? Central governments were never designed for pe..
|
|
nationalism
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
4b8a14c
|
Look at this. A barstool, named Sven? Some old Swedish custom, the winter kicks in, weather gets harsh, after a while you find yourself relating to the furniture in ways you didn't expect?
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
bfd6237
|
When they happen across an Adventurer from Mexico, and the ancient City he has discover'd beneath the Earth, where thousands of Mummies occupy the Streets in attitudes of Living Business, embalm'd with Gold divided so finely it flows like Gum.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
dc1087b
|
London the secular city instructs him: turn any corner and he can find himself inside a parable.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
b7f1669
|
No matter how the official narrative of this turns out there are the places we should be looking, not in newspapers or television but at the margins, graffiti, uncontrolled utterances, bad dreamers who sleep in public and scream in their sleep.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
1037c6f
|
But it is already light. How long has it been light? All this while, light has come percolating in, along with the cold morning air flowing now across his nipples: it has begun to reveal an assortment of drunken wastrels, some in uniform and some not, clutching empty or near-empty bottles, here draped over a chair, there huddled into a cold fireplace, or sprawled on various divans, un-Hoovered rugs and chaise longues down the different leve..
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
1c9aec7
|
As the landscape turned increasingly chaotic and murderous, the streams of refugees swelled. Another headlong, fearful escape of the kind that in collective dreams, in legends, would be misremembered and reimagined into pilgrimage or crusade ... the dark terror behind transmuted to a bright hope ahead, the bright hope becoming a popular, perhaps someday a national, delusion. Embedded invisibly in it would remain the ancient darkness, too aw..
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
bfecd5a
|
But then last September the rockets came. Them fucking rockets. You couldn't adjust to the bastards.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
430cba1
|
Out there, all around them to the last fringes of occupancy, were Toobfreex at play in the video universe, the tropic isle, the Long Branch Saloon, the Starship Enterprise, Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with invisible audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball highlights, Vietnam footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and midnight jokes, and talking celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle,..
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
522390d
|
he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else's life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
db2ac23
|
Near the exit to the blue patio, DeCoverley Pox and Joaquin Stick stand by a concrete scale model of the Jungfrau, ... socking the slopes of the famous mountain with red rubber hot-water bags full of ice cubes, the idea being to pulverize the ice for Pirate's banana frappes. With their nights' growths of beard, matted hair, bloodshot eyes, miasmata of foul breath, DeCoverley and Joaquin are wasted gods urging on a tardy glacier.
|
|
|
thomas pynchon |
|
49db947
|
The Business of the World is Trade and Death, and you must engage with that unpleasantness, as the price of your not-at-all-assur'd Moment of Purity.-- Fool.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
73a40f9
|
Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia. Given to sentimental impulses, he thought he'd look in on the Sailor's Grave, his old tin can's tavern on East Main Street.
|
|
christmas
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
4cdacc5
|
Every night is Christmas Eve on old East Main, Sailors and their sweethearts all agree. Neon signs of red and green Shine upon the friendly scene, Welcoming you in from off the sea. Santa's bag is filled with all your dreams come true: Nickel beers that sparkle like champagne, Barmaids who all love to screw, All of them reminding you It's Christmas Eve on old East Main.
|
|
christmas
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
c257b86
|
Before long, Maxine finds herself wandering around clicking on everything, faces, litter on the floor, labels on bottles behind the bar, after a while interested not so much in where she might get to than the texture of the search itself.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
84c36a7
|
They have found a house in the stay-away zone, under the barrage balloons south of London. The town, evacuated in '40, is still "regulated"--still on the Ministry's list. Roger and Jessica occupy the place illegally, in a defiance they can never measure unless they're caught. Jessica has brought an old doll, seashells, her aunt's grip filled with lace knickers and silk stockings. Roger's managed to scare up a few chickens to nest in the emp..
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
0af87d8
|
They sit there for a minute while unknown forms of life pursue recreational activities in their food.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
00ef473
|
All this home-computer gaming, Nintendo 64, PlayStation, now this Xbox thing, maybe I just want the boys to see what blowing aliens away was like in the olden days.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
5d3bace
|
At the corner store they invaded a hot dog stand and drank pina colada to sober up. It did no good.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
863c97c
|
Listen to anything and take it apart again. Spectrum analysis, in my head. I can break down chords, and timbres, and words too into all the basic frequencies and harmonics, with all their different loudnesses, and listen to them, each pure tone, but all at once.
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
2fd25b2
|
Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof. In his dreams these had been carrier pigeons from someplace far across the ocean, landing and taking off again one by one, each bearing a message for him, but none of whom, light pulsing in the wings, he could ever quite get to in time. He understood it ..
|
|
|
Thomas Pynchon |