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423f321
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Remember that Puritans were utterly devoted, like literary critics, to the Word.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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acdd573
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It soon becomes clear that everybody's pretending for tonight that they're still in the pre-crash fantasy years, dancing in the shadow of last year's dreaded Y2K, no safely history, but according to this consensual delusion not quite upon them yet, with all here remaining freeze-framed back at the Cinderella moment of midnight of the millennium when in the next nanosecond the world's computers will fail to increment the year correctly and b..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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924bf38
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Aah, God help us, how sleazy is it, and how has it come to this? a rented palace, a denial of the passage of time, a mogul on the black-diamond slopes of the IT sector thinks he's a rock star.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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f00766b
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For recessional music there's "Closing Time" by Semisonic, a four-chord farewell to the old century."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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2ef153f
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which of them can see ahead, among the microclimates of binary, tracking earthwide everywhere through dark fiber and twisted pairs and nowadays wirelessly through spaces public and private, anywhere among cybersweatshop needles flashing and never still, in that unquiet vastly stitched and unstitched tapestry they have all at some time sat growing crippled in the service of-to the shape of the day imminent, a procedure waiting execution, abo..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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c1356f3
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Ruins he goes daily to look in are each a sermon on vanity.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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e345e5e
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A viewing population brought back to its default state, dumb struck, undefended, scared shitless.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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f119ff5
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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 apar..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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3e03975
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For many people laughing is a way of being loud without having to say a thing.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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d8ec9e5
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Out of the blackness of the ward, a half-open file drawer of pain each bed a folder, come cries, struck cries, as from cold metal.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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4e6ff55
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The Depression, by the time it came, ratified what'd been under way. Slothrop grew up in a hilltop desolation of businesses going under, hedges around the estates of the vastly rich, half-mythical cottagers from New York lapsing back now to green wilderness or straw death, all the crystal windows every single one smashed, Harrimans and Whitneys gone, lawns growing to hay, and the autumns no longer a time for foxtrots in the distances, limou..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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efb60eb
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Increasingly she's finding it harder to tell the 'real' NYC from translations like Zigotisopolis... as if she keeps getting caught in a vortex taking her farther back in time into the virtual world. Certainly unforeseen in the original business plan, there arises now a possibility that DeepArcher is about to overflow out into the perilous gulf between screen and face.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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a9d4df3
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Acts have consequences, Dixon, they must. These Louts believe all's right now,-- that they are free to get on with Lives that to them are no doubt important,-- with no Glimmer at all of the Debt they have taken on. That is what I smell'd,-- Lethe-Water. One of the things the newly-born forget, is how terrible its Taste, and Smell. In Time, these People are able to forget ev'rything. Be willing but to wait a little, and ye may gull them agai..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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6af6e00
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One thing he had to give her credit for, she'd never called it a Relationship. "What is it then, hey," he'd asked once. "A secret," with her small child's smile, which like Rodgers and Hammerstein in 3/4 time rendered Profane fluttery and gelatinous."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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b1c7695
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Inside McClintic Sphere was swinging his ass off. His skin was hard, as if it were part of the skull: every vein and whisker on that head stood out sharp and clear under the green baby spot: you could see the twin lines running down from either side of his lower lip, etched in by the force of his embouchure, looking like extensions of his mustache. He blew a hand-carved ivory alto saxophone with a 4 1/2 reed and the sound was like nothing ..
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ornette-coleman
jazz
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Thomas Pynchon |
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fa1dd3f
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arriving at a mansion with another gate, low and nearly invisible inside its landscape gardening, seeming so much constructed of night itself that at sunrise it might all disappear.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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252452d
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makeup supposed to look like no makeup or whatever,
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Thomas Pynchon |
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23c845f
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In the last pocket of darkness before the glare of Beachfront Drive, they came to a pause, a timeless pedestrian gesture in these parts that usually announced a kiss or at least a grabbed ass.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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d73a0a5
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Westside Hochdeutsch mafia, biggest of the big, construction, savings and loans, untaxed billions stashed under an Alp someplace, technically Jewish but wants to be a Nazi, becomes exercised often to the point of violence at those who forget to spell his name with two n's. What's he to you?
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Thomas Pynchon |
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5d5e4b2
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How's that, Motella." "Ooh, like wondering how it must be, getting into bed with somebody, who has another person's name? tattooed on his body?" "No problem unless all you do in bed is read," muttered Lourdes."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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04e354b
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Just don't tell me you're in love, OK?" "Sister, I ain't even in line."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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53bfc7c
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You're the medium Weed and I use to communicate, that's all, this set of holes, pleasantly framed, this little femme scampering back and forth with scented messages tucked in her little secret places." She was too young then to understand what he thought he was offering her, a secret about power in the world. That's what he thought it was. Brock was young then too. She only took it as some parable about his feelings for her, one she didn't ..
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idealism
interesting-undercurrents
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Thomas Pynchon |
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5aab15a
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she had lost just too much control, time was rushing all around her, these were rapids, and as far ahead as she could see it looked like Brock's stretch of the river, another stage, like sex, children, surgery, further into adulthood perilous and real, into the secret that life is soldiering, that soldiering includes death, those those soldiered for, not yet and often never in on the secret, are always, at every age, children.
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end-of-an-era
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Thomas Pynchon |
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e10e3e7
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When they come to explain about the two Transits of Venus, and the American Work filling the Years between, "By Heaven, a 'Sandwich,'" cries Mr. Edgewise. "Take good care, Sirs, that something don't come along and eat it!" His pleasure at being able to utter a recently minted word, is at once much curtailed by the volatile Chef de Cuisine Armand Allegre, who rushes from the Kitchen screaming. "Sond-weech-uh! Sond-weech-uh!," gesticulating a..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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d6b2e5d
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They are examin'd skeptickally. "Not from the Press, are you?" " 'Pon my Word," cry both Surveyors at once. "Drummers of some kind's my guess," puts in a Countryman, his Rifle at his Side, "am I right, Gents?" "What'll we say?" mutters Mason urgently to Dixon. "Oh, do allow me," says Dixon to Mason. Adverting to the Room, "Why aye, Right as a Right Angle, we're out here to ruffle up some business with any who may be in need of Surveying, Lo..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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96f3c26
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The Purveyor of Delusion confers upon his wife a certain expression or twist of Phiz I daresay as old as Holy Scripture,-- a lengthy range of Sentiment, all comprest into a single melancholick swing of the eyes. From some personal stowage he produces another Flask, containing, not the Spruce Beer ubiquitous in these parts, but that favor'd stupefacient of the jump'd-up tradesman, French claret,-- and without offering it to anyone else, incl..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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c84a8c0
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A few years back, one bleak winter afternoon, on the way home from the Pioneer Market on Columbus, some faceless yuppie shoved past March saying "Excuse me," which in New York translates to "Get the fuck outta my way," and which turned out finally to be once too often. March dropped the bags she was carrying in the filthy slush on the street, gave them a good kick, and screamed as loud as she could, "I hate this miserable shithole of a city..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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3d60baf
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As they stand in the muck of the Cypress Swamp, black and thinly crusted, each Step breaking through to release a Smell of Generations of Deaths, something in it, some principle of untaught Mechanicks, tugging at their ankles, voiceless, importunate,-- a moment arrives, when one of them smacks his Pate for something other than a Mosquitoe. "Ev'rywhere they've sent us,-- the Cape, St. Helena, America,-- what's the Element common to all?" "Lo..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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0564b0c
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She told him later that as soon as he took her wrist that night, she came. And the first time he touched her cunt, squeezed Jessica's soft cunt through her knickers, the trembling began again high in her thighs, growing, taking her over. She came twice before cock was ever officially put inside cunt, and this is important to both of them though neither has figured out why, exactly.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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ba715e0
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Dick" Counterfly had absquatulated swiftly into the night, leaving his son with only a pocketful of specie and the tender admonition, "Got to 'scram,"
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Thomas Pynchon |
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a7d3cda
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Non-Masons stay pretty much in the dark about What Goes On, though now and then something jumps out, exposes itself, jumps giggling back again, leaving you with few details but a lot of Awful Suspicions. Some
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Thomas Pynchon |
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ba0d133
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You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world's intrusion into this one.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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587f829
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the casting had been typically Hollywood: they didn't look or act a bit alike.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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202d02c
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That joyful feelin' when-you're up-on the ceilin
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Thomas Pynchon |
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2b7467c
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You remember the comics in the Daily News? Dick Tracy's wrist radio? it'll be everywhere, the rubes'll all be begging to wear one, handcuffs of the future. Terrific. What they dream about at the Pentagon, worldwide martial law.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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a92fcd2
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remember didn't you sneak away from camp to have a moment alone with What you felt stirring across the land . . . it was the equinox . . . green spring equal nights . . . canyons are opening up, at the bottoms are steaming fumaroles, steaming the tropical life there like greens in a pot, rank, dope-perfume, a hood of smell . . . human consciousness, that poor cripple, that deformed and doomed thing, is about to be born. This is the World ju..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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ac88886
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Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which--though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off--the living genetic c..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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6523b4d
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When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it with a transparent surface parallel to your own front that hums and bisects both your ears, making eyes very alert. The light bends toward chalky blue. Your skin aches. At last: something real.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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cd6800f
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They have lied to us. They can't keep us from dying, so They lie to us about death. A cooperative structure of lies. What have they ever given us in return for the trust, the love--They actually say 'love'--we're supposed to owe Them? Can They keep us from even catching cold? from lice, from being alone? from anything? Before the Rocket we went on believing, because we wanted to. But the Rocket can penetrate, from the sky, at any given poin..
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lying
religion
love
truth
futility-of-war
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Thomas Pynchon |
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aac6b93
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There's never much talk but touches and looks, smiles together, curses for parting. It is marginal, hungry, chilly--most times they're too paranoid to risk a fire--but it's something they want to keep, so much that to keep it, they will take on more than propaganda has ever asked them for. They are in love. Fuck the war.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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5458d58
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What happens to men sometimes,' his father wants to tell Charlie, 'is that one day all at once they'll understand how much they love their children, as absolutely as a child gives away its own love, and the terrible terms that come with that,-- and it proves too much to bear, and they'll not want it, any of it, and they'll back away in fear.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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710ef09
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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 my somehow each time be too bring 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.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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31f855e
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The simpler explanation,' Emerson with a distinct uvular component in his Sigh, 'may be that none of you people has ever known a moment of Transcendence in his life, nor would recognize one did it walk up and bit yese in the Arse,-- and in the long sorry Silence, grows the suspicion that Jesuits are but the latest instance of a true Christian passion evaporated away, leaving no more than the usual hollow desires for Authority and mindless O..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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121e12c
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Son, been wondering about this, ah, "screwing in" you kids are doing. This matter of the, shooting electricity into head, ha-ha? --Waves, Pop. Not just raw electricity. That's fer drips!"
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Thomas Pynchon |