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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d59db55 | Trupul nu-i decat o biata coliba pierduta in pustie. | shogun | James Clavell | |
| fe58784 | It's only Christian to be chivalrous to your enemies. | James Clavell | ||
| e84291f | Goat curry and a female librarian, that's what I'm in the mood for. | librarian | Ben Katchor | |
| f81c0f5 | Perhaps the only reason they survived, Stencil reasoned, was that they were not alone. God knew how many more there were with a hothouse sense of time, no knowledge of life, and at the mercy of Fortune. | youthfulness | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 9aebbfa | Pointsman is the only one here maintaining his calm. He appears unruffled and strong. His lab coats have even begun lately to take on a Savile Row serenity, suppressed waist, flaring vents, finer material, rather rakishly notched lapels. In this parched and fallow time, he gushes affluence. After the baying has quieted down at last, he speaks, soothing: "There's no danger." "No danger?" screams Aaron Throwster, and the lot of them are off a.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 9a220f5 | People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history's rags and straws. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 014fc40 | Gustav is a composer. For months he has been carrying on a raging debate with Saure over who is better, Beethoven or Rossini. Saure is for Rossini. "I'm not so much for Beethoven qua Beethoven," Gustav argues, "but as he represents the German dialectic, the incorporation of more and more notes into the scale, culminating with dodecaphonic democracy, where all notes get an equal hearing. Beethoven was one of the architects of musical freedom.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 9aa35e3 | I used to worry about you, Zoyd, but I see I can rest easy now the Vaseline of youth has been cleared from your life's lens by the mild detergent solution of time, in its passing. . . | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 048994e | It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus. | history science | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 96f043e | It's still unmessed-with country. You like to think it goes on forever, but the colonisers are coming. The suits and tenderfeet. You can hear the blue-eyed-soul music over the ridgeline. There's already a half dozen well-funded projects for designing software to crawl the Deep Web -" "Is that," Maxine wonders, "like, 'Ride the Wild Surf'?" "Except summer will end all too soon, once they get down here, everything'll be suburbanised faster th.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 9454112 | You see how many whips and things there are here. Our horses are very, very naughty. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| abe0c21 | It isn't the sort of argument Pointsman relishes either. But he glances sharply at this young anarchist in his red scarf. "Pavlov believed that the ideal, the end we all struggle toward in science, is the true mechanical explanation. He was realistic enough not to expect it in his lifetime. Or in several lifetimes more. But his hope was for a long chain of better and better approximations. His faith ultimately lay in a pure physiological ba.. | science mechanism philosophy-of-science explanation | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 12c2404 | The Doper's Dream Last night I dreamed I was plugged right in To a bubblin' hookah so high, When all of a sudden some Arab jinni Jump up just a-winkin' his eye. 'I'm here to obey all your wishes,' he told me. As for words I was trying to grope. 'Good buddy,' I cried, 'you could surely oblige me By turning me on to some dope!' With a bigfat smile he took ahold of my hand, And we flew down the sky in a flash, And the first thing I saw in the .. | dream marijuana drugs | Thomas Pynchon | |
| a576d00 | Pointsman is finding it much easier to of late to slip into a l'etat c'est moi frame of mind--who else is doing anything? | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 07ae274 | Takes them less than a week to run the Line thro' somebody's House. About a mile and a half west of the Twelve-Mile Arc, twenty-four Chains beyond Little Christiana Creek, on Wednesday, April 10th, the Field-Book reports, "At 3 Miles 49 Chains, went through Mr. Price's House." "Just took a wild guess," Mrs. Price quite amiable, "where we'd build it,-- not as if my Husband's a Surveyor or anything. Which side's to be Pennsylvania, by the way.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 6cfa3ec | You felt she'd done a thousand secret things to her eyes. They needed no haze of cigarette smoke to look at you out of sexy and fathomless, but carried their own along with them. New York must have been for her a city of smoke, its streets the courtyards of limbo, its bodies like wraiths. Smoke seemed to be in her voice, in her movements; making her all the more substantial, more there, as if words, glances, small lewdnesses could only beco.. | woman mysterious-woman mystery | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 0da4e79 | Explosion without an objective," declared Miles Blundell, "is politics in its purest form." | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| cea6030 | It is a three-piece affair, everything quilted, long jacket, waistcoat, and trousers, which have Feet at the ends of them, all in striped silk, a double stripe of some acidick Rose upon Celadon for the Trousers and Waistcoat, and for the Jacket, whose hem touches the floor when, as now, he is seated, a single stripe of teal-blue upon the same color, which is also that of the Revers. . . . It is usually not wise to discuss matters of costume.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 94e3de5 | As spread thighs are to the libertine...so was the letter V to young Stencil. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| fc07593 | A swaddled silence would be over the island, nights like that: if they complained, or had to cry for some lesion or cramp, it was baffled by the thick mists and all you heard was the tide, slapping ever sideways along the strand, viscous, reverberating; then seltzering back to sea, violently salt, leaving a white skin on the sand it hadn't taken. And only occasionally above the mindless rhythm, from across the narrow strait, over on the gre.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 630f6ae | Out of that night and day of unconditional wrath, folks would've expected to see any city, if it survived, all newly reborn, purified by flame, taken clear beyond greed, real-estate speculating, local politics--instead of which, here was this weeping widow, some one-woman grievance committee in black, who would go on and save up and lovlingly record and mercilessly begrudge every goddamn single tear she ever had to cry, and over the years t.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 0a44a0c | The row ostensibly has to do with tables versus CSS, a controversial issue of the time, which has always, given its level of passion, struck Maxine as somehow religious. She imagines it will be difficult, no matter which side prevails, to appreciate, ten years from now, the all-consuming nature of the dispute. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 97a11d9 | A market need no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself-its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened-that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that .. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| cafee5f | MARG: You are so close. STEN: To whom? Margravine, not even to himself. This place, this island: all his life he's done nothing but hop from island to island. Is that a reason? Does there have to be a reason? Shall he tell you: he works for no Whitehall, non conceivable unless, ha, ha, the network of white halls in his own brain: these featureless corridors he keeps swept and correct for occasional visiting agents. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 222cb0d | Strange, strange are the dynamics of oil and the ways of oilmen. | petroleum | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 40ec22e | Runners are bouncing up and down at the curb waiting for lights to change. Cops are in coffee shops dealing with bagel deficiencies. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 3b62933 | Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 77778a8 | People who dress up in bizarre costumes have a savoir-vivre - not to mention the sort of personality disorder - that he admires. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 51d7d9e | The classic hustle is still famous, even today, for the cold purity of its execution: bring opium from India, introduce it into China00howdy Fong, this here's opium, opium, this is Fong--ah, so, me eatee!--no-ho-ho, Fong, you smokee, smokee, see? pretty soon Fong's coming back for more and more, so you create an inelastic demand for that shit, get China to make it illegal, then sucker China into a couple-three disastrous wars over the right.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 3d00153 | For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America, and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 8861ca6 | Which is why Slothrop now observes his coalition with hopes for success and hopes for disaster about equally high (and no, that doesn't cancel out to apathy--it makes a loud dissonance that dovetails inside you sharp as knives). It does annoy him that he can be so divided, so perfectly unable to come down on one side or another. Those whom the old Puritan sermons denounced as "the glozing neuters of the world" have no easy road to haul down.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| c88d207 | But there I was, surrendering to a most extraordinary call from the grave, the mass-grave-to-be of Europe, as if somewhere ahead lay an iron gateway, slightly ajar, leading to a low and sombre country, with an incalculable crowd on sides and bearing me along. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 1becb9c | Don't commit original sin. Try and let her just be. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 2d6fbdf | She had been privileged to live outside of Time, to enter and leave at will, looting and manipulating, weightless, invisible. Now Time had claimed her again, put her under house arrest, taken her passport away. Only an animal with a full set of pain receptors after all. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 50f519f | Mason prefers to switch over to Tea, when it is Dixon's turn to begin shaking his head. "Can't understand how anyone abides that stuff." "How so?" Mason unable not to react. "Well, it's disgusting, isn't it? Half-rotted Leaves, scalded with boiling Water and then left to lie, and soak, and bloat?" "Disgusting? this is Tea, Friend, Cha,-- what all tasteful London drinks,-- that," pollicating the Coffee-Pot, "is what's disgusting." "Au contra.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 8397caa | It had been dark at the beach for hours, he hadn't been smoking much and it wasn't headlights--but before she turned away, he could swear he saw light falling on her face, the orange light just after sunset that catches a face turned to the west, watching the ocean for someone to come in on the last wave of the day, in to shore and safety. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 9ef761e | Not everybody benefits from a misspent youth. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 79acc2a | Nostalgia lurks, ready to ooze from ambush. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 5927644 | Men had it so simple. When it wasn't about Sticking It In, it was about Having The Gun, a variation that allowed them to Stick It In from a distance. | sex-and-violence | Thomas Pynchon | |
| b01f2a0 | When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 52633f1 | Every mode of violent death available to Renaissance man, including a lye pit, land mines, a trained falcon with envenom'd talons, is employed. It plays, as Metzger remarked later, like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 9c8e6fb | it was luck, dumb luck, that had put them each where they were, and the best way to pay for any luck, however temporary, was just to be helpful when you could. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 6123957 | American voices, country voices, high-pitched and without mercy. He lies freezing, wondering if the bedsprings will give him away. For possibly the first time he is hearing America as it must sound to a non-American. Later he will recall that what surprised him most was the fanaticism, the reliance not just on flat force but on the rightness of what they planned to do...he'd been told long ago to expect this sort of thing from Nazis, and es.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 8b284ad | Yet is Dixon certain, as certain as the lightness he feels now, lightness premonitory of Flying, that far worse happen'd here, to these poor People, as the blood flew and the Children cried, - that at the end no one understood what they said as they died. | Thomas Pynchon |