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e6486da
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Our product is still totally DeepArcher?" "Which is..." "Like 'departure', only you pronounce it DeepArcher?" "Zen thing," Maxine guesses. "Weed thing."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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d1fd09d
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What sort of an age is this where a man becomes one's enemy only when his back is turned?
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Thomas Pynchon |
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910ac23
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Hair and drug-use issues notwithstanding, I've never thought of you as any less than professional.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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1d5a4fa
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Why is it that we honor the Great Thieves of Whitehall, for Acts that in Whitechapel would merit hanging? Why admire one sort of Thief, and despise the other? I suggest, 'tis because of the Scale of the Crime.--What we of the Mobility love to watch, is any of the Great Motrices, Greed, Lust, Revenge, taken out of all measure, brought quite past the scale of the ev'ryday world, approaching what we always knew were the true Dimensions of Desi..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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053acb4
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Is it just this miserable fucking city, too many faces, making us crazy? Are we seeing some wholesale return of the dead?" "You'd prefer retail?"
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Thomas Pynchon |
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a9a9921
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Just be advised, boys,' she said, 'you'll want to watch your step, 'cause what I am is, is like a small-diameter pearl of the Orient rolling around on the floor of late capitalism-- lowlifes of all income levels may step on me now and then but if they do it'll be them who slip and fall and on a good day break their ass, while the ol' pearl herself just goes a-rollin' on.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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6afff14
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the hole left by the moon's tearing-free and monument to her exile;
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Thomas Pynchon |
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82b608a
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He gazes through sunlight's buttresses, back down the refectory at the others, wallowing in their plenitude of bananas, thick palatals of their hunger lost somewhere in the stretch of morning between them and himself. A hundred miles of it, so suddenly. Solitude, even among the meshes of this war, can when it wishes so take him by the blind gut and touch, as now, possessively. Pirate's again some other side of a window, watching strangers e..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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ed9c6e6
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My mother is the war,' declares Roger Mexico, leaning over to open the door.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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351e655
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Teamwork," Koteks snarled, "is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It's a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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11f6174
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What's a colony without its dusky natives? Where's the fun if they're all going to die off? Just a big chunk of desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction or the mining--wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets... Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Coloni..
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colonialism
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Thomas Pynchon |
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cf20ad1
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Just to say evil Islamics did it, that's so lame, and we know it. We see those official close-ups on the screen. The shifty liar's look, the twelve-stepper's gleam in the eye. One look at these faces and we know they're guilty of the worst crimes we can imagine. But who's in any hurry to imagine? To make the awful connection? Any more than Germans were back in 1933, when Nazis torched Reichstag within a month of Hitler becoming chancellor. ..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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5b6508d
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Do you remember that piece of footage on the local news, just as the first tower comes down, woman runs in off the street into a store, just gets the door closed behind her, and here comes this terrible black billowing, ash, debris, sweeping through the streets, gale force past the window. . .that was the moment, Maxi. Not when 'everything changed.' When everything was revealed. No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. ..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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f2c9c45
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I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which the pre-historic wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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1656ca4
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Sometimes he'll chuckle at something, but rarely. Whenever somebody asks how come everybody's laughing at something and he isn't, Horst explains his belief that laughter is sacred, a momentary noodge from some power out in the universe, only cheapened and trivialized by laugh tracks. He has a low tolerance for unmotivated and mirthless laughter in general. "For many people, especially in New York, laughing is a way of being loud without hav..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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ba03b96
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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.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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f163340
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Whenever I put the headset on now," he'd continued, "I really do understand what I find there. When those kids sing about 'She loves you,' yeah well, you know, she does, she's any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the 'you' is everybody. And herself. Oedipa, the human voice, you know, it's a flipping miracle." His eyes brimming, reflecting..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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ab5eed2
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After the 11 September attack," March editorializes one morning, "amid all that chaos and confusion, a hole quietly opened up in American history, a vacuum of accountability, into which assets human and financial begin to vanish. Back in the days of hippie simplicity, people liked to blame 'the CIA' or 'a secret rogue operation.' But this is a new enemy, unnamable, locatable on no organization chart or budget line--who knows, maybe even the..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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84894fa
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San Narciso was a name; an incident among our climatic records of dreams and what dreams became among our accumulated daylight, a moment's squall-line or tornado's touchdown among the higher, more continental solemnities--storm-systems of group suffering and need, prevailing winds of affluence. There was the true continuity, San Narciso had no boundaries. No one knew yet how to draw them. She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sens..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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ec2f95f
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Not the first time Doc had run into girl-of-his-dreams unavailability.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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66b3954
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It went on for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remember..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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90d149f
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We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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5a85f27
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What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not the still photograph of finished character but the movie, the soul in flux.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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86eafec
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He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing its world in only three.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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78497b6
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To those of us who survived [...], it also means that we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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42f131a
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If there is something comforting-religious , if you want-about paranoia-there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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b4cfd5f
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One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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870e6cd
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Hey. Nobody has any trouble believing in the internet, right, which really is magic. So what's the problem believing in a virtual private network for Santa's business? It results in real toys, real presents, delivered by Christmas morning, what's the difference?
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Thomas Pynchon |
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dda33f8
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Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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1a2e49c
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Because everybody on the school board, and the railroad, and the PTA and paper mill had to be somebody's mother or father, whether really or as a member of a category; and there was a point at which the reflex to their covering warmth, protection, effectiveness against bad dreams, bruised heads and simple loneliness took over and made worthwhile anger with them impossible.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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a302bbe
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What Jessica said--hair much shorter, wearing a darker mouth of different outline, harder lipstick, her typewriter banking in a phalanx of letters between them--was: "We're going to be married. We're trying very hard to have a baby." All at once there is nothing but his asshole between Gravity and Roger. "I don't care. Have his baby. I'll love you both--just come with me Jess, please... I need you...." She flips a red lever on her interco..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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79a6653
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Well, and keep in mind where those Masonic Mysteries came from in the first place. (Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you'll ever find here.)
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ishmael-reed
masonic-mysteries
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Thomas Pynchon |
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1bbd13d
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Shit, money, and the World, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country's fate. But they did not prosper... about all they did was persist
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truth
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Thomas Pynchon |
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92aad44
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You never want to see kids repeat your own mistakes.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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9bb76c4
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The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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bfc8dfb
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They are approaching now a lengthy brick improvisation, a Victorian paraphrase of what once, long ago, resulted in Gothic cathedrals--but which, in its own time, arose not from any need to climb through the fashioning of suitable confusions toward any apical God, but more in a derangement of aim, a doubt as to the God's actual locus (or, in some, as to its very existence), out of a cruel network of sensuous moments that could not be transce..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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f34b73f
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Holy shit." This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19th-century wilderness sunset, a few of which got set down, approximated, on canvas, landscapes of the American West by artists nobody ever heard of, when the land was still free and the eye innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct. Here it thunders now over the Mediterranean, high and lonely, this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer that can be foun..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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2083d47
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This advice has been given often and more compellingly elsewhere, but my specific piece of wrong procedure back then was, incredibly, to browse through the thesaurus and note words that sounded cool, hip, or likely to produce an effect, usually that of making me look good, without then taking the trouble to go and find out in the dictionary what they meant
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Thomas Pynchon |
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99bf874
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if you think you see no slaves in pennsylvania," replies capt. zhang, his face as smooth as suet, "why, look again. they are not all african, nor do some of them even yet know,--may never know,--that they are slaves. slavery is very old upon these shores,--there is no innocence upon the practice anywhere, neither among the indians nor the spanish nor in the behavior of the rest of christendom, if it come to that."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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fe8a0a4
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A phrase (it often happened when he was exhausted) kept cycling round and round, preconsicously, just under the threshold of lip and tongue movement: "Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic." It repeated itself automatically and Stencil improved upon on it each time, placing emphasis on different words--"events "; "seem to be "; " logic"--pronouncing them differently, changing the "tone of voice" from sepulchral to jaunty: round..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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0ef92f4
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If there is any political moral to be found in this world," Stencil once wrote in his journal, "it is that we carry on the business of this century with an intolerable double vision. Right and Left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouses of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets by manipulated mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the fut..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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fbf4dc1
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San Narciso lay further south, near L.A. Like 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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Thomas Pynchon |
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5e8dcc3
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It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private. Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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7d93fb8
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Remember, God didn't say, 'I'm gonna make light now,' he said, 'Let there be light.' His first act was to to what had been Nothing. Like God, you also have to always work with the light, make it do only what you want it to do.
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Thomas Pynchon |