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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6791cae | One glance at any government budget anywhere in the world tells the story--the money is always in place, already allocated, the motive everywhere is fear, the more immediate the fear, the higher the multiples. | government | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 6cc68d3 | Doc followed the prints of her bare feet already collapsing into rain and shadow, as if in a fool's attempt to find his way back into a past that despite them both had gone on into the future it did. The surf, only now and then visible, was hammering at his spirit, knocking things loose, some to fall into the | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| fa254f6 | Death is a debt to nature due, Which I have paid, and so must you. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 69d8223 | Results have not been encouraging. We seem up against a dilemma built into Nature, much like the Heisenberg situation. There is nearly complete parallelism between analgesia and addiction. The more pain it takes away, the more we desire it. It appears we can't have one property without the other, any more than a particle physicist can specify position without suffering an uncertainty as to the particle's velocity-- | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 11143c6 | He continues to believe, here on his French leave, and at his ease, that the interference is temporary and paper, a matter of messages routed and orders cut, an annoyance that will end when the War ends, so well have They busted the sod prairies of his brain, tilled and sown there, and subsidized him not to grow anything of his own... | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| b6e9cdf | The band played up and down valleys still in those days unknown except to a few real-estate visionaries, little crossroads places where one day houses'd sprawl and the rates of human affliction in all categories zoom. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 307b5bf | It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional. This may have nothing to do with the acts we have committed, or the humors we do go in and out of. It may be only the room--a cube--having no persuasive powers of its own. The room simply is. To occupy it, and find a metaphor there for memory, is our own fault. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 509e473 | It was the U.S.A., after all, and fear was in the air. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| d2bf531 | Why here? Why should the rainbow edges of what is almost on him be rippling most intense here in this amply coded room? say why should walking in here be almost the same as entering the Forbidden itself--here are the same long rooms, rooms of old paralysis and evil distillery, of condensations and residues you are afraid to smell from forgotten corruptions, rooms full of upright gray-feathered statues with wings spread, indistinct faces in .. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 88e254f | Doc remembered how Polaroids have no negatives and the life of the prints is limited. These, he noticed, were already beginning to shift color and fade. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| bba0819 | But underneath all this reasonable talk, this scientific speculating, no white Afrikaner could quite put down the way it felt...Something sinister was moving out in the veld: he was beginning to look at their faces, especially those of the women, lined beyond the thorn fences, and he knew beyond logical proof: there was a tribal mind at work out here, and it had chosen to commit suicide...Puzzling. Perhaps we weren't as fair as we might hav.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 2cd934d | Well right now Slothrop feels himself sliding onto the anti-paranoid part of his cycle, feels the whole city around him going back roofless, vulnerable, uncentered as he is, and only pasteboard images now of the Listening Enemy left between him and the wet sky. Either They have put him here for a reason, or he's just here. He isn't sure that he wouldn't actually, rather have that reason... | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| b3accf8 | That's what Jesus meant," whispers the ghost of Slothrop's first American ancestor William, "venturing out on the Sea of Galilee. He saw it from the lemming point of view. Without the millions who had plunged and drowned, there could have been no miracle. The successful loner was only the other part of it: the last piece to the jigsaw puzzle, whose shape had already been created by the Preterite, like the last blank space on the table." "Wa.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 5aee1b1 | Is the Tube human? Semihuman? Well, uh, how human's that, so forth. Are TV sets brought alive by broadcast signals, like the clay bodies of men and women animated by the spirit of God's love? | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 30014d2 | 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 | ||
| a0e53a8 | It was one of those great iron afternoons in London: the yellow sun being teased apart by a thoasand chimneys breathing, fawning upward without shame. This smoke is more than the day's breath, more than dark strength--it is an imperial presence that lives and moves. People were crossing the streets and squares, going everywhere. Busses were grinding off, hundreds of them, down the long concrete viaducts, smeared with years' pitiless use and.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| d90e9a7 | The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safe-passage tonight to its far blood's branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see. Nothing of the night's could touch her; nothing did. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 6d06035 | When you gentlemen come to stand at the Boundary between the Settl'd and the Unpossess'd, just about to enter the Deep Woods, you will recognize the Sensation.... | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| d5ef632 | Witnesses parade in, there is the travesty of a trial, and Ercole meets his end in a refreshingly simple mass stabbing. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 7ea5072 | You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world's intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there's cataclysm. Like the church we hate, anarchists also believe in another world. Where revolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless, and the soul's talent for consensus allows the masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body itself. And yet, sena, if any of it .. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| b26b62a | Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 784d339 | There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 89af2e5 | What of Thought? The Crew had developed a kind of shorthand whereby they could set forth any visions that might come their way. Conversations at the Spoon had become little more than proper nouns, literary allusions, critical or philosophical terms linked in certain ways. Depending on how you arranged the building blocks at your disposal, you were smart or stupid. Depending on how others reacted they were In or Out. The number of blocks, ho.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 944a438 | William Slothrop was a peculiar bird. He took off from Boston, heading west in true Imperial style, in 1634 or -5, sick and tired of the Winthrop machine, convinced he could preach as well as anybody in the hierarchy even if he hadn't been officially ordained. The ramparts of the Berkshires stopped everybody else at the time, but not William. He just started climbing. He was one of the very first Europeans in. After they settled in Berkshir.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 8c517c8 | It was as if she had just discovered the irreversible process. It astonished her to think that so much could be lost, even the quantity of hallucination belonging just to the sailor that the world would bear no further trace of. She knew, because she had held him, that he suffered DT's. Behind the initials was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind's plowshare. The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoy.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 0262556 | If you look from the side at a planet swinging around in its orbit, split the sun with a mirror and imagine a string, it all looks like a yo-yo. The point furthest from the sun is called aphelion. The point furthest from the yo-yo hand is called, by analogy, apocheir. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 4ee74c6 | But elephants have souls. Anything that can get drunk, he reasoned, must have some soul. Perhaps this is all "soul" means. Events between soul and soul are not God's direct province: they are under the influence either of Fortune, or of virtue." | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| e0d308a | UTSL, which Maxine at first takes for an anagram of LUST or possibly SLUT but later learns is Unix for "Use The Source, Luke." | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 0800817 | Who am I to know my own motives. But I did foolhardy things. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| e6f8ab9 | I haven't sold my soul yet - well, maybe a couple bars of rhythm and blues here and there. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 333c99d | yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| ada47ac | Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country's fate. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| fed3f53 | 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. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible.... | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 6ad8bc5 | Internet - tova v'lshebno udobstvo, koeto pronikva kato miris i v nai-drebnite detaili na zhivota ni - pazaruvaneto, domakinstvoto, domashnite raboti, dan'tsite - i absorbira energiiata ni, iziazhda vremeto ni. I v nego niama nevinnost. Nik'de. I nikoga ne e imalo. Zachenat e v griakh, nai-uzhasniia ot vsichki. Stava vse po-goliam, no v s'rtseto mu prod'lzhava da se tai gorchivo i studeno vlechenie k'm sm'rtta na planetata... beleznitsite n.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| bab6881 | As ever, he is surpriz'd by the fierceness of their bodies, their inability to hold back, the purity of the not-yet-dishonest,-- 'twould take a harder Case than Mason not to struggle with Tears of Sentiment. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| df9bd81 | But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice--guessed and refused to believe--that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children. . .. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 40c8f6d | I want to break out - to leave this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered inseparable, into the radiance of what we would become. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| ff64514 | I don't do lunch. Corrupt artifact of late capitalism. Breakfast maybe? | lunch | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 48fcd03 | What? -- RICHARD M NIXON | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 898dd4b | We were not rich, but my parents had adjusted their lifestyle to their incomes--and in the end that is a big part of the battle. | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| d6687e6 | The financial sector provides ample rewards for those who agree with them: lucrative consultancies, research grants, and the like. The documentary raises a question: Could this have influenced some economists' judgments? | Joseph E. Stiglitz | ||
| 60cda82 | It was similar to a feeling he used to experience long ago when, after months of translating with the aid of a dictionary, he would finally read a passage from a French novel, or an Italian sonnet, and understand the words, one after another, unencumbered by his own efforts. In those moments Mr. Kapasi used to believe that all was right with the world, that all struggles were rewarded, that all of life's mistakes made sense in the end. The .. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 16f3d1a | People are starving, and this is their solution, he eventually said. They turn victims into criminals. They aim guns at people who can't shoot back. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| deb6b3d | avevo bisogno di una lingua differente: una lingua che fosse un luogo di affetto e di riflessione. --ANTONIO TABUCCHI | Jhumpa Lahiri |