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d90e9a7
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The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safe-passage tonight to its far blood's branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see. Nothing of the night's could touch her; nothing did.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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6d06035
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When you gentlemen come to stand at the Boundary between the Settl'd and the Unpossess'd, just about to enter the Deep Woods, you will recognize the Sensation....
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Thomas Pynchon |
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d5ef632
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Witnesses parade in, there is the travesty of a trial, and Ercole meets his end in a refreshingly simple mass stabbing.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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7ea5072
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You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world's intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there's cataclysm. Like the church we hate, anarchists also believe in another world. Where revolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless, and the soul's talent for consensus allows the masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body itself. And yet, sena, if any of it ..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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b26b62a
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Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. 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..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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784d339
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There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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89af2e5
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What of Thought? The Crew had developed a kind of shorthand whereby they could set forth any visions that might come their way. Conversations at the Spoon had become little more than proper nouns, literary allusions, critical or philosophical terms linked in certain ways. Depending on how you arranged the building blocks at your disposal, you were smart or stupid. Depending on how others reacted they were In or Out. The number of blocks, ho..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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944a438
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William Slothrop was a peculiar bird. He took off from Boston, heading west in true Imperial style, in 1634 or -5, sick and tired of the Winthrop machine, convinced he could preach as well as anybody in the hierarchy even if he hadn't been officially ordained. The ramparts of the Berkshires stopped everybody else at the time, but not William. He just started climbing. He was one of the very first Europeans in. After they settled in Berkshir..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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8c517c8
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It was as if she had just discovered the irreversible process. It astonished her to think that so much could be lost, even the quantity of hallucination belonging just to the sailor that the world would bear no further trace of. She knew, because she had held him, that he suffered DT's. Behind the initials was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind's plowshare. The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoy..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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0262556
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If you look from the side at a planet swinging around in its orbit, split the sun with a mirror and imagine a string, it all looks like a yo-yo. The point furthest from the sun is called aphelion. The point furthest from the yo-yo hand is called, by analogy, apocheir.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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4ee74c6
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But elephants have souls. Anything that can get drunk, he reasoned, must have some soul. Perhaps this is all "soul" means. Events between soul and soul are not God's direct province: they are under the influence either of Fortune, or of virtue."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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e0d308a
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UTSL, which Maxine at first takes for an anagram of LUST or possibly SLUT but later learns is Unix for "Use The Source, Luke."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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0800817
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Who am I to know my own motives. But I did foolhardy things.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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e6f8ab9
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I haven't sold my soul yet - well, maybe a couple bars of rhythm and blues here and there.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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333c99d
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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 have 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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ada47ac
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Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country's fate.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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fed3f53
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You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are 'yours' and which are 'mine.' It's past sorting out. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible....
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Thomas Pynchon |
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6ad8bc5
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Internet - tova v'lshebno udobstvo, koeto pronikva kato miris i v nai-drebnite detaili na zhivota ni - pazaruvaneto, domakinstvoto, domashnite raboti, dan'tsite - i absorbira energiiata ni, iziazhda vremeto ni. I v nego niama nevinnost. Nik'de. I nikoga ne e imalo. Zachenat e v griakh, nai-uzhasniia ot vsichki. Stava vse po-goliam, no v s'rtseto mu prod'lzhava da se tai gorchivo i studeno vlechenie k'm sm'rtta na planetata... beleznitsite n..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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bab6881
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As ever, he is surpriz'd by the fierceness of their bodies, their inability to hold back, the purity of the not-yet-dishonest,-- 'twould take a harder Case than Mason not to struggle with Tears of Sentiment.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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df9bd81
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But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice--guessed and refused to believe--that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children. . ..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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40c8f6d
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I want to break out - to leave this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered inseparable, into the radiance of what we would become.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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ff64514
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I don't do lunch. Corrupt artifact of late capitalism. Breakfast maybe?
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lunch
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Thomas Pynchon |
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48fcd03
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What? -- RICHARD M NIXON
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Thomas Pynchon |
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1a02163
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Eeh, but whah's the use, the fuckin' use?" Dixon resting his head briefly tho' audibly upon the Table. "It's over . . . ? Nought left to us but Paper-work . . . ?" Their task has shifted, from Direct Traverse upon the Line to Pen-and-Paper Representation of it, in the sober Day-Light of Philadelphia, strain'd thro' twelve-by-twelve Sash-work, as in the spectreless Light of the Candles in their Rooms, suffering but the fretful Shadows of Dix..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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241ffa8
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This is just how they want you, an animal, a bitch with swollen udder lying in the dirt, blank-faced, surrendered, reduced to this meat, these smells...
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Thomas Pynchon |
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298ce34
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What's known as bleeding-edge technology," sez Lucas. "No proven use, high risk, something only early-adoption addicts feel comfortable with."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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c16f13f
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No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into --
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Thomas Pynchon |
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be61374
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But in the dynamic space of the living Rocket , the double integral has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled...'Meters per second ' will integrate to 'meters.' The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It never did fall.
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time
symbolism
physics
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Thomas Pynchon |
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a446988
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But in the dynamic space of the living Rocket, the double integral has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled..."Meters per second" will integrate to "meters." The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It never did fall."
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time
symbolism
physics
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Thomas Pynchon |
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528a5e4
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She finds the door wide open and the place empty, another failed dotcom joining the officescape of the time--tarnished metallic surfaces, shaggy gray soundproofing, Steelcase screens and Herman Miller workpods--already beginning to decompose, littered, dust gathering . . . Well, almost empty. From some distant cubicle comes a tinny electronic melody Maxine recognizes as "Korobushka," the anthem of nineties workplace fecklessness, playing fa..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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248906d
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If patterns of ones and zeros were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least--an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this bein..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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41f5878
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Paranoiata e ches'n't v kukhniata na zhivota, vinagi mozhesh da slozhish oshche malko, nali?
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life
pynchon
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Thomas Pynchon |
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07ac1d2
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When you reach a point in your life where you understand who is fucking who --beg pardon, Lord-- who's taking it and who's not, that's when you're obliged to choose how much you'll go along with. If you are not devoting every breath of every day waking and sleeping to destroying those who slaughter the innocent as easy as signing a check, then how innocent are you willing to call yourself? It must be negotiated with the day, from those abso..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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6d0256e
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For about ten minutes the vengeful crew proceed to maim, strangle, poison, burn, stomp, blind and otherwise have at Pasquale, while he describes intimately his varied sensations for our enjoyment.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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3280e0f
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Our Meat Facial today, Ms. Loeffler?" "Uhm, how's that." "You didn't get our offer in the mail? on special all this week, works miracles for the complexion--freshly killed, of course, before those enzymes've had a chance to break down, how about it?" "Well, I don't . . ." "Wonderful! Morris, kill . . . the chicken!" From the back room comes horrible panicked squawking, then silence. Maxine meantime is tilted back, eyelids aflutter, when-- "..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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19c9b31
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They steered south. Gordita Beach emerged from the haze, gently flaking away in the salt breezes, the ramshackle town in a spill of weather-beaten colors, like paint chips at some out-of-the-way hardware store, and the hillside up to Dunecrest, which Doc had always thought of, especially after nights of excess, as steep, a grade everybody sooner or later wiped their clutch trying to get up and out of town on, looking from out here strangely..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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24e9279
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As a courtesy I'm taking you out to the impound garage to get your vehicle. We've been over it with the best tools available to forensic science, and except for enough cannabis debris to keep an average family of four stoned for a year, you're clean. No blood or impact evidence we can use. Congratulations.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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c97d31a
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Tis useful nonetheless, now and then, to regard Politics here, as the greater American Question in Miniature,-- in the way that Chess represents war,-- with Governor Penn a game-piece in the form of the King.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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27cb9dc
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But as we all know, rock 'n' roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever.
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life
henry-adams
slow-learner
slow-learner-early-stories
thomas-pynchon
rock-and-roll
introduction
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Thomas Pynchon |
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da92eeb
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They talked in the car always, he trying to find the key to her own ignition behind the hooded eyes, she sitting back of the right-hand steering wheel and talking, talking, nothing but MG-words, inanimate-words he couldn't really talk back at. Soon
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Thomas Pynchon |
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20b503a
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The eyes from Burma, from Tonkin, watch these women at their hundred perseverances--stare out of blued orbits, through headaches no Alasils can ease. Italian P/Ws curse underneath the mail sacks that are puffing, echo-clanking in now each hour, in seasonal swell, clogging the snowy trainloads like mushrooms, as if the trains have been all night underground, passing through the country of the dead. If these Eyeties sing now and then you can ..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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ff648be
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It's nothing he can see or lay hands on - sudden gases, a violence upon the air and no trace afterward... a Word, spoken with no warning into your ear, and then silence forever. Beyond its invisibility, beyond hammerfall and doomcrack, here is its real horror, mocking, promising him death with German and precise confidence, laughing down all of Tantivy's quiet decencies... no, no bullet with fins, Ace... not the Word, the one Word that rips..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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5210b00
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I'm talking to God here, be with ye as soon as we're done,-- Is Mason going to get angry and into a fight? Will he stand and announce, "This is none of God's judgment,-- to be offended as gravely by Calendar Reform as by Mortal Sin, requires a meanness of spirit quite out of the reach of any known Deity,-- tho' well within the resources of Stroud, it seems." And walk out thro' their stunn'd ranks to the Embrace of the Night, and never enter..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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799835a
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Doc went automotively groping in this weirdness east on Olympic, trying not to flinch at what came popping up out of the gloom in the way of city buses and pedestrians in altered states of consciousness.
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Thomas Pynchon |