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dca2144
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The past, hey no shit, it's an open invitation to wine abuse.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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09c264b
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If there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty ...little heads.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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9da7d4a
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Doc fell in to a car convoy, moving slowly, single lane through the fog. He figured if he missed the Gordita Beach exit, he'd take the first one whose sign he could read and work his way back on surface streets. He knew that at Rosecrans, the freeway began to dogleg east, and at some point, Hawthorne Boulevard or Artesia,he'd lose the fog, unless it was spreading tonight, and settled in region wide... Maybe then it would stay this way for d..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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d6f8bb8
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There is a Hand to turn the time, Though thy Glass today be run, Till the Light hath brought the Towers low Find the last poor Preterite one . . . Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road, All through our crippl'd Zone, With a face in ev'ry Mountainside
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Thomas Pynchon |
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fe7a0fa
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Time is never wasted if you remember to bring along something to read.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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f186b7b
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There had hung the sense of buffering, insulation, she had noticed the absence of an intensity, as if watching a movie, just perceptibly out of focus, that the projectionist refused to fix. And had also gently conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret, looking for somebody to say hey, let down your hair.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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fd998d4
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Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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528c22a
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Death has come in the pantry door: stands watching them, iron and patient, with a look that says 'try to tickle me.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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27cfd87
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They have had their moment of freedom. Webley has only been a guest star. Now it's back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death--death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowledge that it will die.... "I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn't free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the lou..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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5a7cf08
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They gaze at each other for a while, down here on the barroom floor of history, feeling sucker-punched, no clear way to get up and on with a day which is suddenly full of holes--family, friends, friends of friends, phone numbers on the Rolodex, just not there anymore. . .the bleak feeling, some mornings, that the country itself may not be there anymore, but being silently replaced screen by screen with something else, some surprise package,..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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48fbbb6
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You had to been there, kid. Everybody thinks now the Eisenhower years were so quaint and cute and boring, but all that had a price, just underneath was the pure terror. Midnight forever. If you stopped even for a minute to think, there it was and you could fall into it so easily. Some fell. Some went nuts, some even took their own lives.
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idealism
revisionism
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Thomas Pynchon |
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3902eba
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Oh, this beer here is cold, cold and hop-bitter, no point coming up for air, gulp, till it's all--hahhhh.
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humor
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Thomas Pynchon |
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43f3718
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In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where's his basis for comparing?
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octopi
slothrop
octopus
mental-health
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Thomas Pynchon |
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44be9ae
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She drove like one of the damned on holiday.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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dd27d42
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Street cred. Anybody who got in before '97 is considered OK - from '97 to 2000 it can go either way, maybe they're not not always cool, but usually they're not quite the kind of full-service dickhead you're seeing in the business now." "He's considered cool?" "No, he's a dickhead, but one of the early ones. A pioneer dickhead."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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0b30f81
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But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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561df91
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You wait. Everyone has an Antarctic.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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ff5233c
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And what we've been always been is...?" "Is living on borrowed time. Never caring about who's paying for it, who's starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs ... planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There's no uninnocent dead." Af..
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koan
innocent
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Thomas Pynchon |
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be4d86a
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Sometimes in the shadows the view would light up, usually when he was smoking weed, as if the contrast knob of Creation had been messed with just enough to give everything an underglow, a luminous edge, and promise that the night was about to turn epic somehow.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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b0c37eb
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His life had been tied to the past. He'd seen himself a point on a moving wavefront, propagating through sterile history--a known past, a projectable future. But she was the breaking of the wave. Suddenly there was a beach, the unpredictable... new life. Past and future stopped at the beach: that was how he'd set it out. But he wanted to believe it too, the same way he loved her, past all words--believe that no matter how bad the time, noth..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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b0bcaef
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The nights are filled with explosion and motor transport, and wind that brings them up over the downs a last smack of the sea. Day begins with a hot cup and a cigarette over a little table with a weak leg that Roger has repaired, provisionally, with brown twine. 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 someth..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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8363e50
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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, my..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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e8a466a
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You can only cruise the boulevards of regret so far, and then you've got to get back up onto the freeway again.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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636573c
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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. We do know what's going on, and we let it go on. As long as we can see them, stare at them, those massively moneyed, once in a while. As long as they allow us a glimpse, however rarely. We need that. And they know it - how often, under what conditions...
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Thomas Pynchon |
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9ad3824
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Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phr..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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7da675e
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Ten million dead. Gas. Passchendaele. Let that be now a large figure, now a chemical formula, now an historical account. But dear lord, not the Nameless Horror, the sudden prodigy sprung on a world unaware. We all saw it. There was no innovation, no special breach of nature, or suspension of familiar principles. If it came as any surprise to the public then their own blindness is the Great Tragedy, hardly the war itself.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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7a271af
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She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike "clues" were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having ..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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76061b2
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There are two more turds, smaller ones, and when he has eaten these, residual shit to lick out of her anus. He prays that she'll let him drop the cape over himself, to be allowed, in the silk-lined darkness, to stay a while longer with his submissive tongue straining upward into her asshole. But she moves away. The fur evaporates from his hands. She orders him to masturbate for her. She has watched Captain Blicero with Gottfried, and has le..
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sex
truth
sex-advice
reality-check
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Thomas Pynchon |
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67eeb6a
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As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.
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persistence
death
persist
remembrance
wine
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Thomas Pynchon |
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98c3518
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What Machine is it that bears us along so relentlessly? We go rattling thro' another Day,- another Year,- as thro' an empty Town without a Name, in the Midnight...we have but Memories of some Pause at the Pleasure-Spas of our younger Day, the Maidens, the Cards, the Claret,- we seek to extend our stay, but now a silent Functionary in dark Livery indicates it is time to re-board the Coach, and resume the Journey. Long before the Destination,..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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5e7d7c4
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He was visited on a lunar basis by these great unspecific waves of horniness, whereby all women within a certain age group and figure envelope became immediately and impossibly desirable. He emerged from these spells with eyeballs still oscillating and a wish that his neck could rotate through the full 360 degrees.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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fe3cd11
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If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic,what else?
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Thomas Pynchon |
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8edb72c
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Yeah, but nowadays it's all you see anymore is cops, the tube is saturated with fucking cop shows, just being regular guys, only tryin to do their job, folks, no more threat to nobody's freedom than some dad in a sitcom. Right. Get the viewer population so cop-happy they're beginning to be run in. Good-bye Johnny Staccato, welcome and while you're at it please kick my door down, Steve McGarrett.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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bdd7d09
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times of great idealism carry equal chances for great corruptibility.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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a99d7ca
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Time travel, as it turns out, is not for civilian tourists, you don't just climb into a machine, you have to do it from the inside out, with your mind and body, and navigating Time is an unforgiving discipline. It requires years of pain, hard labor, and loss, and there is no redemption--of, or from, anything.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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7edfd9e
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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.
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life
love
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Thomas Pynchon |
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3848a57
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The magic in these Masonic rituals is very, very old. And way back in those days, it worked. As time went on, and it started being used for spectacle, to consolidate what were only secular appearances of power, it began to lose its zip. But the words, moves, and machinery have been more or less faithfully carried down over the millennia, through the grim rationalizing of the World, and so the magic is still there, though latent, needing onl..
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freemasonry
rituals
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Thomas Pynchon |
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858ca3a
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Like so many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts--census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.
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freeways
southern-california
cities
places
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Thomas Pynchon |
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eb6f193
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This spiritualist, this statistician, what are you anyway?
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Thomas Pynchon |
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3d7a27a
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Odd, yes, here in the capital of eternal youth, endless summer and all, that fear should be running the town again as in days of old, like the Hollywood blacklist you don't remember and the Watts rioting you do - it spreads, like blood in a swimming pool, till it occupies all the volume of the day. And then maybe some playful soul shows up with a bucketful of piranhas, dumps them in the pool, and right away they can taste the blood. They sw..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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ef1b039
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What's this? What are the antagonists doing here - infiltrating their own audience? Well, they're not really. It's somebody else's audience at the moment, and these nightly spectacles are an appreciable part of the darkside hours of life of the rocket capital. The chances for any paradox here, really, are less than you think.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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88c7235
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So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence - not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be - its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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a99fb3f
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People in this town saw only what they'd all agreed to see, they believed what was on the tube or in the morning papers half of them read while they were driving to work on the freeway, and it was all their dream about being wised up, about the truth setting them free.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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97c5dbf
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Too many of us have to sit foolishly by while something comes out of the dark, strikes, returns to wherever it came from, as if we are too fragile for a world of happy families, whose untroubled destinies require that the rest of us be sacrificed.
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Thomas Pynchon |