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626fed7
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So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and nebulae for sandals, Fausto's kind (poets) are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the "practical" half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, street..
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true
postmodernism
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Thomas Pynchon |
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0fb454f
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'tis flatten and fold, isn't it, and flatten again, among the thicknesses of Hide, till presently you've these very thin Sheets of Gold-Leaf." "Lamination," Mason observes. "Lo, Lamination abounding," contributes Squire Haligast, momentarily visible, "its purposes how dark, yet have we ever sought to produce these thin Sheets innumerable, to spread a given Volume as close to pure Surface as possible, whilst on route discovering various new ..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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72b2901
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And over my head," relates Squire Haligast, "it form'd an E-clipse, an emptiness in the Sky, with a Cloud-shap'd Line drawn all about it, wherein words might appear, and it read,-- 'No King . . ."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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dc821f9
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Reef lit a hemp-and-tobacco cigarette and reviewed his situation, while around him infectious melodies and rhythms went on refashioning the night.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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eda4fd3
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Here's what you do," suggested Tansy Wagwheel, whom this job in just a few short weeks would drive screaming down Fifteenth Street and on into the embrace of the Denver County public-school system, "It's in this wonderful book I keep close to me all the time, A Modern Christian's Guide to Moral Perplexities. Right here, on page eighty-six, is your answer. Do you have your pencil? Good, write this down--'Dynamite Them All, and Let Jesus Sort..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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5210300
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Now everybody-
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now
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Thomas Pynchon |
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5b95014
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Some days it seems like every lowlife in town has Tail 'Em and Nail 'Em on their grease-stained Rolodex. A number of phone messages have piled up on the answering machine, breathers, telemarketers, even a few calls to do with tickets currently active. After some triage on the playback, Maxine returns an anxious call from a whistle-blower at a snack-food company over in Jersey which has been secretly negotiating with ex-employees of Krispy K..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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1d8f3a4
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Even though there is a villain here, serious as death. It is this typical American teenager's own Father, trying episode after episode to kill his son. And the kid knows it. Imagine that.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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e4ea285
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Here was world of simplicity and certainty no acidhead, no revolutionary anarchist would ever find, a world based on the one and zero of life and death. Minimal, beautiful. The patterns of life and deaths...
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Thomas Pynchon |
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4cd9e39
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It's wrong because if you pick up a rifle, the Man picks up a machine gun, by the time you find some machine gun he's all set up to shoot rockets, begin to see a pattern?
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Thomas Pynchon |
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38319fe
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had occurred to very few in the hopeful-starlet community that regular features and low body weight might not after all be counted on to buy you a thing that mattered. The shock of the Cielo Drive murders was bad enough out in civilian life, but the impact on Shasta and her friends was paralyzing. You could be the sweetest girl in the business, smart with your money, careful about dope, aware of how far to trust people in this town, which w..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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086644f
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writers, people you didn't even have to say hello to--and still be horribly murdered for your trouble. Once-overs you'd found ways to ignore now had you looking for the particular highlight off some creep's eyes that would send you behind double and triple locks to a room lit only by the TV screen, and whatever was in the fridge to last you till you felt together enough to step outside again.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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5220304
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Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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2db097f
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She wondered, wondered, shuffling back through a fat deckful of days which seemed (wouldn't she be first to admit it?) more or less identical, or all pointing the same way subtly like a conjurer's deck, any odd one readily clear to a trained eye.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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55ef967
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What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain. But were Oedipa some single melted crystal of urban horse, L.A., really, would be no less turned on for her absence.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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257ab72
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Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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c42c7c3
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Tell Penny how groovy it was of her to set up this little get-together, oh, and hey--can I be frank for a minute?" "Of course," said Agents Flatweed and Borderline. Snapping his fingers, Doc sang himself out the door with four bars of "Fly Me to the Moon,"
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Thomas Pynchon |
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4d131fd
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Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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57782a4
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A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
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war
sky
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Thomas Pynchon |
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afa2374
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a pocket full of spare change and anger unlimited, what more does a 30-year-old innocent need to make his way in the city?
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Thomas Pynchon |
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6eac4b4
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Around then Jade happened by again. "Thought that was you," Doc said, "though we ain't exactly been wallerin in eye contact. Got your note at the office, but why'd you go runnin away like that? we could've hung out, you know, smoke some shit."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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e71b2bf
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The film libraries on some of these channels." Elmina said. "I swear. There was one on last night. I couldn't sleep. After I saw, it, I was afraid ro sleep. Have you seen Black Narcissus, 1947?" Eddie, who was enrolled in the graduate film program at SC, let out a scream of recognition. He's been working on his doctoral dissertation, "Deadpasn to Demoniac - Subtextual Uses of Eyeliner in the Cinema," and had just in fact arrived at moment i..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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40fe5da
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The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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267dcca
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First time they met was on a cruise, if you think of "cruise" in maybe more of a specialized way. In the wake of her separation, back in what still isn't quite The Day, from her then husband, Horst Loeffler, after too many hours indoors with the blinds drawn listening on endless repeat to Stevie Nicks singing "Landslide" on a compilation tape she ignored the rest of, drinking horrible Crown Royal Shirley Temples and chasing them with more g..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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b4ce2cb
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An old rusty beer can lay in her path; she kicked it viciously. What is it, she thought, is this the way Nueva York is set up, then, freeloaders and victims? Schoenmaker freeloads off my roommate, she freeloads of me. Is there this long daisy chain of victimisers and victims, screwers and screwees? And if so, who is it I am screwing.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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e82d18c
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You could fall in love with me, you can talk to my shrink, you can hide a tape recorder in my bedroom, see what I talk about from wherever I am when I sleep. You want to do that? You can put together clues, develop a thesis, or several, about why characters reacted to the Trystero possibility the way they did, why the assassins came on, why the black costumes. You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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d35c37f
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Sometimes things aren't very clear, that's all. Things look like they're going against us, and though it always turns out fine in the end, and we can always look back and say oh of course it had to happen that way, otherwise so-and-so wouldn't have happened--still while it's happening, in my heart I keep getting this terrible fear, this empty place, and it's very hard at such times really to believe in a Plan with a shape bigger than I can ..
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faith
religion
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Thomas Pynchon |
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ed0941d
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Two of them there drinking red liquor like it was sadness medicine.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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d5b0845
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Someone brings up "Sandwiches," and someone else a Bottle, and as night comes down over New-York like a farmer's Mulch, sprouting seeds of Light, some reflected in the River, the Company, Mason working on in its midst, becomes much exercis'd upon the Topick of Representation. "No taxation-- " "-- without it, yesyes but Drogo, lad, can you not see, even thro' the Republican fogs which ever hang about these parts, that 'tis all a moot issue, ..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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bb0d542
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any concentrated mass is actually a local distortion of space itself, there happens to be exactly one surface, registered with the U.S. Patent Office, which, incorporated into a suitable hat design, will take the impact load of any known safe falling from any current altitude, transmitting to the wearer only the most trivial of resultant vectors.
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science
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Thomas Pynchon |
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3fadaa9
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Slothrop hears a girl singing. Accompanying herself on a balalaika. One of those sad little Parisian-sounding tunes in 3/4: Love never goes away, Never completely dies, Always some souvenir Takes us by sad surprise. You went away from me, One rose was left behind-- Pressed in my Book of Hours, That is the rose I find. . . . Though it's another year, Though it's another me, Under the rose is a drying tear, Under my linden tree. . . . ..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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fbcfa45
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And what if many-even if most-of the Slothropian stars are proved, some distant day, to refer to sexual fantasies instead of real events? This would hardly invalidate our approach, any more than it did young Sigmund Freud's, back there in old Vienna, facing a similar violation of probability-all those Papi-has-raped-me stories, which might have been lies evidentially, but were certainly the truth clinically. You must realize: we are concern..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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cd1b088
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Bianca is usually silver, or of no color at all: thousands of times taken, strained through glass, warped in and out the violet-bleeding interfaces of Double and Triple Protars, Schneider Angulons, Voigtlander Collinears, Steinheil Orthostigmats, the Gundlach Turner-Reichs of 1895.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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cd1843e
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I dreamt of a City to the West of here," Dixon tries to recall, scrying in his Coffee-Mug, the wind blowing Wood-smoke in his eyes, "at some great Confluence of Rivers, or upon a Harbor in some inland Sea,-- a large City,-- busy, prospering, sacred." "A Sylvan Philadelphia. . . ." "Well . . . well yes, now tha put it thah' way,-- " "I hope you are prepar'd for the possibility, that waking Philadelphia is as sacred as anything over here will..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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010acaa
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Yet at least he had believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade j..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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d8f5926
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If a season like the Great Rebellion ever came to him again, he feared, it could never be in that same personal, random array of picaresque acts he was to recall and celebrate in later years at best furious and nostalgic; but rather with a logic that chilled the comfortable perversity of the heart, that substituted capability for character, deliberate scheme for political epiphany (so incomparably African); and for Sarah, the sjambok, the d..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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8f54585
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Consider," replies the Geomancer, "-- Adam and Eve ate fruit from a Tree, and were enlighten'd. The Buddha sat beneath a Tree, and he was enlighten'd. Newton, also sitting beneath a Tree, was hit by a falling Apple,-- and he was enlighten'd. A quick overview would suggest that Trees produce Enlightenment. Trees are not the Problem. The Forest is not an Agent of Darkness. But it may be your Visto is."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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54bfdd2
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To rule forever," continues the Chinaman, later, "it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call . . . Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,-- to create thus a Distinction betwixt 'em,-- 'tis the first stroke.-- All else will follow as if predestin'd, unto War and Deva..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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a19816c
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It is the dark, hard, tobacco-starved, headachey, sour-stomached, middle of the day, a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them know it, many about now are already onto the second or third pint or highball glass, which produces a certain desperate aura here.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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538fa30
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As if somehow irony," she recaps for Maxine, "as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious -- weakening its grip on 'reality.' So all kinds of make-believe--forget the delusional state the country's in already--must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now." "Yeah, the kids are even getting it at school." Ms. Cheung, an English teacher ..
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fiction
literalism
reality-tv
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Thomas Pynchon |
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11b5799
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Up on the bridge of the Anubis, the storm paws loudly on the glass, great wet flippers falling at random in out of the night whap! the living shape visible just for the rainbow edge of the sound--it takes a certain kind of maniac, at least a Polish cavalry officer, to stand in this pose behind such brittle thin separation, and stare each blow full in its muscularity. Behind Procalowski the clinometer bob goes to and fro with his ship's roll..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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79390ac
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Together they are a long skin interface, flowing sweat, close as muscles and bones can press, hardly a word beyond her name, or his.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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96d6478
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Out in the Field, Down by the Sea, The Hour has peal'd, Whoever ye be, Daughter of Erin, Scotia's Son, Let us be daring,-- Let it be done. It is time for The Choosing,-- Americans all, No more refusing The Cry, and the Call,-- For the Grain to be sifted, For the Tyrants to fall, As the Low shall be lifted,-- Americans all . . . Till the end of the Story, Till the end of the Fight, Till the last craven Tory Has taken to Flight, Let..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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3f0920b
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Exhausted, hardly knowing what she was doing, she came the last three steps and sat, took the man in her arms, actually held him, gazing out of her smudged eyes down the stairs, back into the morning. She felt wetness against her breast and saw that he was crying again. He hardly breathed but tears came as if being pumped. "I can't help," she whispered, rocking him, "I can't help." It was already too many miles to Fresno."
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Thomas Pynchon |