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3d53245
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Run away with me," said Roseman when the coffee came. "Where?" she asked. That shut him up." --
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Thomas Pynchon |
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7019150
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You are off on a winding and difficult road, which you conceive to be wide and straight, an Autobahn you can travel at your ease. Is it any use for me to tell you that all you believe real is illusion? I don't know whether you'll listen, or ignore it. You only want to know about your path, your Autobahn.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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e3702d2
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No language meant no chance of co-opting them in to what their round and flaxen invaders were calling Salvation.
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dodo
invasion
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Thomas Pynchon |
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255e447
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Japanese staff who claim not to know a word of English beyond "awesome" and "sucks", which for a vast range of human endeavour, actually, is more than enough..."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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dbb6c1b
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Don't forget the real business of the war is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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91562e3
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She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love
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Thomas Pynchon |
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d5787fc
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Not if you've been where we have. Forty years ago, in Sudwest, we were nearly exterminated. There was no reason. Can you understand that? No reason. We couldn't even find comfort in the Will of God Theory. These were Germans with names and service records, men in blue uniforms who killed clumsily and not without guilt. Search-and-destroy missions, every day. It went on for two years. The orders came down from a human being, a scrupulous but..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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d7e047d
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film and calculus, both pornographies of flight.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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6e33e3c
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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 was enlighten'd. a quick overview would suggest 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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8f287aa
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Once the solar parallax is known,' they told me, 'once the necessary Degrees are measur'd, and the size and weight and shape of the Earth are calculated inescapably at last, all this will vanish. We will have to seek another Space.' No one explain'd what that meant, however ...? 'Perhaps some of us will try living upon thy own Surface. I am not sure that everyone can adjust from a concave space to a convex one. Here have we been sheltered, ..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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263e3a9
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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 Devastat..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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9d9fb9a
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If patterns of ones and zeroes were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?"
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science
computers
science-fiction
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Thomas Pynchon |
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545116d
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He is suddenly, dodderer and ass, taken by an ache in his skin, a simple love for them both that asks nothing but their safety, and he'll always manage to describe as something else--'concern,' you know, 'fondness...
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Thomas Pynchon |
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847530f
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Keep it bouncing," he'd told her once, "that's all the secret, keep it bouncing."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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f9c8047
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I haven't sold my soul yet--well, maybe a couple bars of rhythm and blues here and there,
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Thomas Pynchon |
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36d6bad
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How do you feel about this terrible thing?" "Terrible," said Oedipa. "Wonderful!"
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Thomas Pynchon |
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49e6e91
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Oedipa resolved to pull in at the next motel she saw, however ugly, stillness and four walls having at some point become preferable to this illusion of speed, freedom, wind in your hair, unreeling landscape--it wasn't. 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..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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3f77c4f
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Proverbs for Paranoids: 1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures. 2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master. 3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers. 4. You hide, they seek. 5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paran..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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4fbb1c0
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If her luck held, she'd never have to know. The baby was perfect cover, it made her something else, a mom, that was all, just another mom in the nation of moms, ad all she'd ever have to do to be safe was stay inside that particular fate, bring up the kid, grow into some version of Sasha... speak the right lines, stay within budget, wrap each day, one by one, before she lost the light.
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settling-for-less
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Thomas Pynchon |
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f34af5c
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There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present as his own assembley--perhaps heavily paranoid voices whisper, 'his time's assembley'--and there ought to be a punchline to it, but there isn't. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead and being scattered. His cards have been laid down, Celtic style, in the order suggested by Mr. A.E. Waite, laid out and read, but they are the cards of a tan..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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c7079de
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True pornography is given us by vastly patient professionals.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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0f16db9
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She has stepped out into a different night, a different town altogether, one of those first-person-shooter towns that you can drive around in seemingly forever, but never away from. The only humanity visible are virtual extras in the distance, none offering any of the help she needs.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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ae324de
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What I mean is something like a closed circuit. Everybody on the same frequency. And after a while you forget about the rest of the spectrum and start believing that this is the only frequency that counts or is real. While outside, all up and down the land, there are these wonderful colors and x-rays and ultraviolets going on.
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reinforcement
opinion
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Thomas Pynchon |
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0ee592f
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She sank with an enormous sigh that carried all rigidity like a mythical fluid from her, down next to him; so weak she couldn't help him undress her; it took him 20 minutes, rolling, arranging her this way and that, as if she thought, he were some scaled-up, short-haired, poker-faced little girl with a Barbie doll. She may have fallen asleep once or twice. She awoke at last to find herself getting laid; she'd come in on a sexual crescendo i..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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061301c
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It was always easy, in open and lonely places, to be visited by Panic wilderness fear, but these are the urban fantods here, that come to get you when you are lost or isolate inside the way time is passing, when there is no more History, no time-travelling capsule to find your way back to, only the lateness and the absence that fill a great railway shed after the capital has been evacuated, and the goat-god's city cousins wait for you at th..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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66e1dba
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Zoyd was out of smokes.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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005300d
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Meanwhile, back in the torture room, the cardinal is now being forced to bleed into a chalice and consecrate his own blood, not to God, but to Satan. They also cut off his big toe, and he is made to hold it up like a Host and say, "This is my body," the keenwitted Angelo observing that it's the first time he's told anything like the truth in fifty years of systematic lying."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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171c6a3
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Time of course has showed the question up in all its young illogic. We can justify any apologia simply by calling life a successive rejection of personalities. No apologia I s any more than a romance--half a fiction--in which all the successive identities are taken on and rejected by the writer as a function of linear time are treated as separate characters. The writing itself even constitutes another rejection, another "character" added to..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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5aabb5a
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Pirate and Osbie Feel are leaning on their roof-ledge, a magnificent sunset across and up the winding river, the imperial serpant, crowds of factories, flats, parks, smoky spires and gables, incandescent sky casting downward across the miles of deep streets and roofs cluttering and sinuous river Thames a drastic strain of burnt orange, to remind a visitor of his mortal transience here, to seal or empty all the doors and windows in sight to ..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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978fde9
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Could we have been so much in the midst of life? With such a sense of grand adventure about it all?
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Thomas Pynchon |
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0c11bc0
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Man, I want to die, is all," cried Ploy. "Don't you know," said Dahoud, "that life is the most precious possession you have?"
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Thomas Pynchon |
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53b1b32
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For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories, and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world's affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence. For them the music was sweet and painful, the strolling chains..
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youth
love
you
me
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Thomas Pynchon |
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4a2f1c8
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Oh, THE WORLD OVER THERE, it's So hard to explain! Just-like, a dream's-got, lost in yer brain!
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Thomas Pynchon |
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4fabc54
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I think that there is a terrible possibility now, in the World. We may not brush it away, we must look at it. It is possible that They will not die. That it is now within the state of Their art to go on forever - though we, of course, will keep dying as we always have. Death has been the source of Their power. It was easy enough for us to see that. If we are here once, only once, then clearly we are here to take what we can while we may. If..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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88410bf
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Each day the mythical return Enzian dreamed of seems less possible. Once it was necessary to know uniforms, insignia, airplane markings, to observe boundaries. But by now too many choices have been made. The single root lost, way back there in the May desolation. Each bird has his branch now, and each one is the Zone.
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Thomas Pynchon |
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e536a6e
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She had heard all about excluded middles ; they were bad shit, to be avoided...
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Thomas Pynchon |
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bc1f068
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On the face of it," Vehi Fairfield said finally, "two separate worlds, each unaware of the other. But they always connect someplace." --
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Thomas Pynchon |
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9cd0c71
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Everybody out on the sidewalk is a pedestrian Mercedes, wallowing in entitlement--colliding, snarling, shoving ahead without even the hollow-to-begin-with local euphemism "Excuse me."
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Thomas Pynchon |
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34168f7
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part of me must have really wanted to believe--like a child hearing, in perfect safety, a tale of horror--that the unconscious would be like any other room, once the light was let in. That the dark shapes would resolve only into toy horses and Biedermeyer furniture. That therapy could tame it after all, bring it into society with no fear of its someday reverting. I wanted to believe, despite everything my life had been. Can you imagine?
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Thomas Pynchon |
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d11005f
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Everyone watching over his shoulder, Free French plotting revenge on Vichy traitors, Lublin Communists drawing beads on Varsovian shadow-ministers, ELAS Greeks stalking royalists, unrepatriable dreamers of all languages hoping through will, fist, prayer to bring back kings, republics, pretenders, summer anarchisms that perished before the first crops were in . . . some dying wretchedly, nameless, under ice-and-snow surfaces of bomb craters ..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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24fe971
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At one edge of the base, pressed between the fenceline and the sea, shimmered the pale archways and columns, the madrone and wind-shaped cypresses of the clifftop campus of College of the Surf. Against the somber military blankness at its back, here was a lively beachhead of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, the strains of subversive music day and night, accompanied by tambourines and harmonicas, reaching like fog through the fence, up the dry..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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4b5ae51
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Indoors, the evening gets you'd say festive, with Maxine riding Horst for the better part of an hour, not that it's anybody's business of course, and coming a number of times, at last fiercely in sync with Horst, not long after which, owing to some extrasensory cue from the television, whose mute feature has been engaged, they surface from their post-orgy daze in time to witness Derek Jeter's clutch tenth-inning homer and another trademark ..
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Thomas Pynchon |
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47e2036
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Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?
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Thomas Pynchon |
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8d195f7
|
Listen to me, Defecates-with-Pigeons. Long before any of you came here, we dream'd of you. All the people, even Nations far to the South and the West, dreamt you before ever we saw you,-- we believ'd that you came from some other World, or the Sky. You had Powers and we respected them. Yet you never dream'd of us, and when at last you saw us, wish'd only to destroy us. Then the killing started,-- some of you, some of us,-- but not nearly as..
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Thomas Pynchon |