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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1037c6f | But it is already light. How long has it been light? All this while, light has come percolating in, along with the cold morning air flowing now across his nipples: it has begun to reveal an assortment of drunken wastrels, some in uniform and some not, clutching empty or near-empty bottles, here draped over a chair, there huddled into a cold fireplace, or sprawled on various divans, un-Hoovered rugs and chaise longues down the different leve.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 1c9aec7 | As the landscape turned increasingly chaotic and murderous, the streams of refugees swelled. Another headlong, fearful escape of the kind that in collective dreams, in legends, would be misremembered and reimagined into pilgrimage or crusade ... the dark terror behind transmuted to a bright hope ahead, the bright hope becoming a popular, perhaps someday a national, delusion. Embedded invisibly in it would remain the ancient darkness, too aw.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| bfecd5a | But then last September the rockets came. Them fucking rockets. You couldn't adjust to the bastards. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 430cba1 | Out there, all around them to the last fringes of occupancy, were Toobfreex at play in the video universe, the tropic isle, the Long Branch Saloon, the Starship Enterprise, Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with invisible audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball highlights, Vietnam footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and midnight jokes, and talking celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle,.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 522390d | he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else's life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| db2ac23 | Near the exit to the blue patio, DeCoverley Pox and Joaquin Stick stand by a concrete scale model of the Jungfrau, ... socking the slopes of the famous mountain with red rubber hot-water bags full of ice cubes, the idea being to pulverize the ice for Pirate's banana frappes. With their nights' growths of beard, matted hair, bloodshot eyes, miasmata of foul breath, DeCoverley and Joaquin are wasted gods urging on a tardy glacier. | thomas pynchon | ||
| 49db947 | The Business of the World is Trade and Death, and you must engage with that unpleasantness, as the price of your not-at-all-assur'd Moment of Purity.-- Fool. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 73a40f9 | Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia. Given to sentimental impulses, he thought he'd look in on the Sailor's Grave, his old tin can's tavern on East Main Street. | christmas | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 4cdacc5 | Every night is Christmas Eve on old East Main, Sailors and their sweethearts all agree. Neon signs of red and green Shine upon the friendly scene, Welcoming you in from off the sea. Santa's bag is filled with all your dreams come true: Nickel beers that sparkle like champagne, Barmaids who all love to screw, All of them reminding you It's Christmas Eve on old East Main. | christmas | Thomas Pynchon | |
| c257b86 | Before long, Maxine finds herself wandering around clicking on everything, faces, litter on the floor, labels on bottles behind the bar, after a while interested not so much in where she might get to than the texture of the search itself. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 84c36a7 | They have found a house in the stay-away zone, under the barrage balloons south of London. The town, evacuated in '40, is still "regulated"--still on the Ministry's list. Roger and Jessica occupy the place illegally, in a defiance they can never measure unless they're caught. Jessica has brought an old doll, seashells, her aunt's grip filled with lace knickers and silk stockings. Roger's managed to scare up a few chickens to nest in the emp.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 0af87d8 | They sit there for a minute while unknown forms of life pursue recreational activities in their food. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 00ef473 | All this home-computer gaming, Nintendo 64, PlayStation, now this Xbox thing, maybe I just want the boys to see what blowing aliens away was like in the olden days. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 5d3bace | At the corner store they invaded a hot dog stand and drank pina colada to sober up. It did no good. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 863c97c | Listen to anything and take it apart again. Spectrum analysis, in my head. I can break down chords, and timbres, and words too into all the basic frequencies and harmonics, with all their different loudnesses, and listen to them, each pure tone, but all at once. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 2fd25b2 | Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof. In his dreams these had been carrier pigeons from someplace far across the ocean, landing and taking off again one by one, each bearing a message for him, but none of whom, light pulsing in the wings, he could ever quite get to in time. He understood it .. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| daaff01 | One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living... and with each one, he thinks he feels patterns on his cortex going dark, settling to sleep forever, parts of whoever he's been losing all definition, reverting to dumb chemistry... | failure getting-older isolation loneliness losing-yourself | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 90e48b5 | The innocent are guilty, the guilty are beyond hope, everything's on its head, it's a Twelfth Night of late-capitalist contradiction... | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 2f9d8e8 | When the earliest Vikings started moving into the northern oceans, there's one story about finding this huge fuckin opening at the top of the world, this deep whirlpool that'd take you down and in, like a black hole, no way to escape. These days you look at the surface Web, all that yakking, all the goods for sale, the spammers and spielers and idle fingers, all in the same desperate scramble they like to call an economy. Meantime, down her.. | internet | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 8d3f082 | Try to squeeze a watermelon into a small tumbler sometime when your reflexes are not so good. It is next to impossible. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 3fcd017 | 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 to save up and lovingly record and mercilessly begrudge every goddamn single tear she ever had to cry, and over the years to .. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 9acaa36 | Well my darlin, can't say it wasn't a blast, shoat but sweet as they say around the pigpen, | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 3eea8b8 | The Telescope, the Flaxions, the inventions of Logarithms and the frenzy of multiplication, often for its own sake, that follow'd have for Emerson all been steps of an unarguable approach to God, a growing clarity,-- Gravity, the Pulse of time, the finite speed of Light present themselves to him as aspects of God's character. It's like becoming friendly with an erratic, powerful, potentially, dangerous member of the Aristocracy. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 85c1686 | Never mind. 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." | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 4b3825d | little Belgium once again busy at what she does best, tamely offering her battlefield-ready lowlands to boots, hooves, iron wheels, waiting to be first to go under before a future no one in Europe has the clairvoyance to imagine as anything more than an exercise for clerks. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| ebe8291 | Well, ring-tailed rutabagas. | thomas pynchon | ||
| d16802e | ay jalisco, no te rejas | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| ab3c317 | I mean only that in our Times, 'tis not a rare Dispute," Maskelyne assures him. "Reason, or any Vocation to it,-- the Pursuit of the Sciences,-- these are the hope of the Young, the new Music their Families cannot follow, occasionally not even listen to." | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 1a380e5 | Nothing he had brought to it of his nearest comparison, Raby with its thatch'd and benevolent romance of serfdom, had at all prepar'd him for the iron Criminality of the Cape,-- the publick Executions and Whippings, the open'd flesh, the welling blood, the beefy contented faces of those whites.... 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 Peop.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 97b6c15 | Was it home, the mercury-lit street? Was he returning like the elephant to his graveyard, to lie down and soon become ivory in whose bulk slept, latent, exquisite shapes of chessmen, backscratchers, hollow open-work Chinese spheres nested one inside the other? | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| c9eb426 | How, Yusef wondered, can two men joke like that and tomorrow be enemies. Perhaps they'd been enemies yesterday. He decided public servants weren't human. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 4ae4a2d | His five feet three rested angular on the folding chair, a body small, well-wrought and somehow precious, as if it were the forgotten creation of any goldsmith--even Cellini--shrouded now in dark serge and waiting to be put up for auction. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| d10d29b | So," she said. All it was was no wheels on Profane, the boy a born pedestrian. Under his own power which was also power over her. Then what was she doing: declaring herself a dependent? As if here were the heart's authentic income-tax form, tortuous enough, mucked up with enough polysyllabic words to take her all of twenty-two years to figure out. At least that long: for surely it was complicated, being a duty you could rightfully avoid wit.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| a9a0cb0 | Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pattern. He learns how to make contact with other kinds of electric appliances, in homes, in factories and out in the streets. Each has something to tell him. The pattern gathers in his soul (Seele, as the core of the earlier carbon filament was known in Germany), and the grander and clearer it grows, the more desperate Byron gets. Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| ce120a4 | At no point in this did Frank think he was dreaming, probably because he seldom remembered dreams, or paid attention to them even if he did. And though this all had the alert immediacy of daytime Mexico in its ongoing dispute with its history, it would someday be relegated as well to the register of experiences he had been unable to find any use for. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| c25db68 | Listen my darling, here's the situation - Wait ... , I'm talkin to a robot here, right? Again. So! uh-huh! how you're doing? how long you been a robot ... You wouldn't be Jewish, by any chance? Yeah, like when you were thirteen, did your parents give you a bot mitzvah? | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 6a530a8 | He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 2ad1944 | so claim'd are the Surveyors in their contra-solar Return by Might-it-bes, and If-it-weres, - not to mention What-was-thats. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| c613414 | Uma geracao atras, o numero cada vez menor de nascimentos de criancas vivas entre os herero era um assunto de grande interesse para os medicos de toda a Africa meridional. Os brancos preocupavam-se, de tal modo como se o gado estivesse atacado de peste bovina. Uma coisa desagradavel, ver a populacao subjugada diminuindo daquele jeito anos apos ano. O que e uma colonia sem seus nativos de pele escura? Que graca tem, se todos eles vao morrer?.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 90a4b6d | There's a poetry to it, engineer's poetry...it suggests --average, you know--certainly you have two lobes, don't you, symmetrical about the rocket's intended azimuth... , too-smashing someone with a hoe or a club..." off on a voyage of his own here, smiling at no one in particular, bringing in the popular wartime expression , quarterstaff technique, peasant humor, phallic comedy dating back to the ancient Greeks...Slothrop's first impulse.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 13a86d2 | When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. Who could withstand the light? What viewer could believe in the war, the system, the countless lies about American freedom, looking into these mugs shots of the bought and sold? | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| a5416ff | Meantime the Newspaper of Record goes around in a little pleated skirt shaking pompoms, leaping in the air with an idiot grin if so much as a cement mixer passes by. | new-york-city new-york-times | Thomas Pynchon | |
| e5ebafe | Nobody in this band was a musician when they joined up, but everybody was in some kind of trouble. Play con entusiasmo, as loudly as you can, and trust the good will and bad ear of the gringo hellraiser. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 085e595 | There had been an uprising by the Bondelswaartz in 1922, and general turmoil in the country. His radio experiments interrupted, he sought refuge, along with a few score other whites, in the villa of a local landowner named Foppl. The place was a stronghold, cut off on all sides by deep ravines. After a few months of siege and debauchery, "haunted by a profound disgust for everything European," Mondaugen went out alone into the bush, ended u.. | triode | Thomas Pynchon |