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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
c0f25a0	Slothrop, who believes that women, like Martians, have antennas men do not, keeps an eye on her.			Thomas Pynchon
39890fc	What's your name?" Oedipa said. "Winthrop Tremaine," replied the spirited entrepreneur, "Winner, for short. Listen, now we're getting up an arrangement with one of the big ready-to-wear outfits in L.A. to see how SS uniforms go for the fall. We're working it in with the back-to-school campaign, lot of 37 longs, you know, teenage kid sizes. Next season we may go all the way and get out a modified version for the ladies. How would that strike..			Thomas Pynchon
1bc4a1a	But don't they look like apes, now, fighting over a female? Even if the female is named Liberty.			Thomas Pynchon
dda6c13	Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled streets and alleyways in a Cartesian grid, sketched in sepia, mile on mile. "The Great Bovine City of the World," breathed Lindsey in wonder. Indeed, the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human hats. From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in everchanging cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, ..			Thomas Pynchon
1ef39ee	Zoyd remembered her...as a tall florid girl in a minidress that bore the image, from neck to hemline, of Frank Zappa's face, thus linking her in Zoyd's mind somehow with Mount Rushmore.			Thomas Pynchon
472cc1b	Hand in hand with Brenda whom he'd met yesterday, Profane ran down the street. Presently, sudden and in silence, all illumination in Valletta, houselight and streetlight, was extinguished. Profane and Brenda continued to run through the abruptly absolute night, momentum alone carrying them toward the edge of Malta, and the Mediterranean beyond			Thomas Pynchon
63c913f	An old Gordita reflex, dating back to shortly after the Second World War, when a black family had actually tried to move into town and the citizens, with helpful advice from the Ku Klux Klan, had burned the place to the ground and then, as if some ancient curse had come into effect, refused to allow another house ever to be built on the site. The lot stood empty until the town finally confiscated it and turned it into a park, where the yout..			Thomas Pynchon
0b4637a	Cyprian was captivated by eyes, but only by those that looked away, with either indifference or active distaste. It was not enough for her to return his gaze. She must then direct her own to other matters. It sent him into a swoon. It got him through that day and part of the next sometimes.			Thomas Pynchon
54b93f2	Tonight she'll be with Jeremy, her lieutenant, but she wants to be with Roger. Except that, really, she doesn't. Does she? She can't remember being so confused. When she is with Roger it's all love, but at any distance- any at all, Jack- she finds that he depresses and even frightens her. Why? On top of him in the wild nights riding up and down his cock her axis, trying herself to stay rigid enough not to turn to cream taper-wax and fall aw..			Thomas Pynchon
47911af	Onto Chastity Bjornsen's car radio came the drawling irreverent brass and subhip syncopation of a Herb Alpert arrangement, which Doc realized with growing horror was a cover of Ohio Express's "Yummy Yummy Yummy." He"			Thomas Pynchon
6d0af2c	After that long of more named pavements than he'd care to count, Profane had grown a little leery of streets, especially streets like this. They had in fact all fused into a single abstracted Street, which come the full moon he would have nightmares about.			Thomas Pynchon
cb10980	It's a dangerous game Cherrycoke's playing here. Often he thinks the sheer volume of information pouring in through his fingers will saturate, burn him out...she seems determined to overwhelm him with her history and its pain, and the edge of it, always fresh from the stone, cutting at his hopes, at all their hopes. He does respect her: he knows that very little of this is female theatricals, really. She has turned her face, more than once,..		futility-of-war indifference	Thomas Pynchon
2aea5f9	The big scandal around IG Farben this week is the unlucky subsidiary Spottbilligfilm AG, whose entire management are about to be purged for sending to OKW weapons procurement a design proposal for a new airborne ray which could turn whole populations, inside a ten-kilometer radius, stone blind. An IG review board caught the scheme in time. Poor Spottbilligfilm. It had slipped their collective mind what such a weapon would do to the dye mark..			Thomas Pynchon
6508f7e	Tonight she'll be with Jeremy, her lieutenant, but she wants to be with Roger. Except that, really, she doesn't. Does she? She can't remember being so confused. When she is with Roger it's all love, but at any distance- any at all, Jack- she finds that he depresses and even frightens her. Why? On top of him in the wild nights riding up and down his cock her axis, trying herself to stay rigid enough not to turn to cream taper-wax and fall aw..			Thomas Pynchon
930e4b4	The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator.		deception power	Thomas Pynchon
0b1adc0	He sees her standing at the end of a passage in her life, without any next step to take--all her bets are in, she has only the tedium now of being knocked from one room to the next, a sequence of numbered rooms whose numbers do not matter, till inertia brings her to the last. That's all.			Thomas Pynchon
8c318cc	Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the po..			Thomas Pynchon
fcf4989	The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of the machine-gun pattern. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a ..		war futility-of-war	Thomas Pynchon
00dc019	the figure dropped like an acid tab into the mouth of Time.			Thomas Pynchon
462687a	Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away.		masochism sadism control capitalism	Thomas Pynchon
1b16ea4	We drank the blood of our enemies. That's why you see Gnostics so hunted. The sacrament of the Eucharist is really drinking the blood of the enemy. The Grail, the Sangraal, is the bloody vehicle. Why else guard it so sacredly? Why should the black honor-guard ride half a continent, half a splintering Empire, stone night and winter day, if it's only for the touch of sweet lips on a humble bowl? No, it's mortal sin they're carrying: to swallo..		drinking-blood mortal-sin holy-grail gnostic	Thomas Pynchon
1458495	Former and future nerdistocracy slowly, and to look at them you'd think reluctantly, filtering back out into the street, into the long September which has been with them in a virtual way since spring before last, continuing only to deepen. Putting their street faces back on for it. Faces already under silent assault, as if by something ahead, some Y2K of the workweek that no one is quite imagining, the crowds drifting slowly out into the li..			Thomas Pynchon
0bc0761	He is a messenger from Slothrop's innocent, pre-octopus past.			Thomas Pynchon
c86a84a	There came to McClintic something it was time he got around to seeing: that the only way clear of the cool/crazy flipflop was obviously slow, frustrating and hard work. Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care. He might have known, if he'd used any common sense. It didn't come as a revelation, only something he'd as soon not've admitted.			Thomas Pynchon
6c92359	Profane had got into this way of thinking, and along with parties in the daytime and a rotating shift system devised by Bung the foreman whereby you didn't know till the day before which hours you would be working the next, it put him on a weird calendar which was not ruled off into neat squares at all but more a mosaic of tilted street-surfaces that changed position according to sunlight, streetlight, moonlight, nightlight... He wasn't com..			Thomas Pynchon
1c8dee3	Why? Why use the room as introduction to an apologia? Because the room, though windowless and cold at night, is a hothouse. Because the room is the past, though it has no history of its own. Because, as the physical being-there of a bed or horizontal plane determines what we call love; as a high place must exist before God's word can come to a flock and any sort of religion begin; so must there be a room, sealed against the present, before ..			Thomas Pynchon
82fae98	Five years Gebrail had hated them. Hated the stone buildings and metaled roads, the iron bridges and glass windows of Shepheard's Hotel which it seemed were only different forms of the dead sand that had taken his home. 'The city,' Gebrail often told his wife, just after admitting he'd come home drunk and just before beginning to yell at his children--the five of them curled blind in the windowless room above the barber like so many puppy-b..			Thomas Pynchon
36372d1	life is Vegas			Thomas Pynchon
2135848	She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity?		truth	Thomas Pynchon
e89a7bc	trying not to get emotional but still hanging on the rearview mirror's single tale of recedings and vanishing points as we hang on looks our lovers give.			Thomas Pynchon
39db209	there was the old hippie-hating mad dog himself, moonlighting after a busy day of civil-rights violation, as pitchman for Channel View Estates.			Thomas Pynchon
79731e4	Death has come in the pantry door: stands watching them, iron and patient, with a look that says try to tickle me. *			Thomas Pynchon
7dbc77e	Wer die Wahrheit beansprucht, den verlasst sie. In Dienst genommen oder gezwungen wird die Historik stets nur von niedrigen Interessen. Sie ist zu unschuldig, als dass man sie in Griffweite irgendeines Machthabers lassen konnte-, der sie nur zu beruhren braucht, und ihre ganze Glaubwurdigkeit ist in einem Augenblick dahin, als ware sie nie gewesen. Sie muss vielmehr liebevoll und in allen Ehren umsorgt werden, und zwar von Fabulisten und Fa..			Thomas Pynchon
25007db	Will Postwar be nothing but "events," newly created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?" --			Thomas Pynchon
ce68bad	and isn't it the curse of the drifter, the desolation of heart we feel each evening at sundown, with the slow loop of the river out there just for a half a minute, catching the last light, pregnant with the city in all its density and wonder, the possibilities never to be counted, much less lived into, by the likes of us, don't you see, for we're only passing through, we're already ghosts.			Thomas Pynchon
4b2e750	Down here everything was dark, but up there the gray conglomerate was being struck by the final light of day to an unanswerable brilliance.			Thomas Pynchon
d62b1c6	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.			Thomas Pynchon
03c4360	The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit.			Thomas Pynchon
8ff6c53	It's always night, or we wouldn't need light. --			Thomas Pynchon
a785316	She would give them order, she would create constellations			Thomas Pynchon
6699fb2	It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted ... secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology ... by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, "Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake," but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night's blood..		war technology	Thomas Pynchon
7a15d39	Can I say something out loud? Is anybody listening?" "Everybody. Nobody. Does it matter?"		paranoiac paranoid	Thomas Pynchon
156e4aa	Ah, I understand", murmured the imperial scapegrace. Turning to the room: "When Franz Ferdinand drinks", he cried, "everybody drinks!" Which helped restore a level of civility in the room, and soon even of cheer, as smart neckties were soaked in suds, the piano player came back from under the bar, and people in the room resumed dancing syncopated two-steps. After a while someone started singing "All Pimps Look Alike to Me", and half the roo..			Thomas Pynchon
752ba4d	At the ukulele workshop that summer. He lectured on the four-note chord in the context of timelessness, and described himself then as a Quaternionist. We had quickly discovered our common love of the instrument," Miles recalled," and discussed the widespread contempt in which ukulele players are held-- traceable, we concluded, to the uke's all-but-exclusive employment as a producer of chords--single, timeless events apprehended all at once ..			Thomas Pynchon

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