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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ba19a8f | Women could protest from now till piss flowed uphill, but the truth was, there wasn't one didn't secretly love a killer. And | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 4264e8c | He sat forlorn, feeling as if that most feared enemy of sleep had entered silently on a busy night, the one person whom you must come face to face with someday, who asks you, in the earshot of your oldest customers, to mix a cocktail whose name you have never heard. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| b0d3567 | One of their last days in unbroken country, the wind was blowing in the high Indian grass, and her father said, "There's your gold, Dahlia, the real article." As usual, she threw him a speculative look, knowing by then roughly what an alchemist was, and that none of that shifty crew ever spoke straight--their words always meant something else, sometimes even because the "something else" really was beyond words, maybe in the way departed sou.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 21b495f | Slothrop's Progress: London the secular city instructs him: turn any corner and he can find himself inside a parable. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 608a900 | Morning developed out the window. His right canine ached. He unreeled the long hair, beaded with saliva, tooth-tartar, mouth-breather's morning fur, and stared at it. How'd it get here? Eerie, dearie. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 697f775 | One of their last days in unbroken country, the wind was blowing in the high Indian grass, and her father said, "There's your gold, Dahlia, the real article." As usual, she threw him a speculative look, knowing by then roughly what an alchemist was, and that none of that shifty crew ever spoke straight--their words always meant something else, sometimes even because the "something else" really was beyond words, maybe in the way departed sou.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 279015d | His life had been tied to the past. He'd seen himself a point on a moving wavefront, propagating through sterile history--a known past, a projectable future. But Jessica was the breaking of the wave. Suddenly there was a beach, the unpredictable . . . new life. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 54c4625 | THE ENGLISHMAN'S VERY SHY (FOX-TROT) (Bloat): The Englishman's very shy, He's none of your Ca-sa-no-va, At bowling the ladies o-ver, A-mericans lead the pack-- (Tantivy): --You see, your Englishman tends to lack That recklessness transatlantic, That women find so romantic Though frankly I can't see why . . . (Bloat): The polygamous Yank with his girls galore Gives your Brit-ish rake or carouser fits, (Tantivy): Though he's secretly .. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| b63b05b | He shared his place with a Dr. Tubeside, whose practice consisted largely of injecting people with "vitamin B12", a euphemism for the physician's own blend of amphetamines. Today, early as it was, Doc still had to edge his way past a line of "B12"- deficient housewives of a certain melancholy index, actors with casting calls to show up at, deeply tanned geezers looking ahead to an active day of schmoozing in the sun, stewardii just off in s.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| fb10625 | Planted rows went turning past like giant spokes one by one as they ranged the roads. The skies were interrupted by dark gray storm clouds with a flow like molten stone, swept and liquid, and light that found its way through them was lost in the dark fields but gathered shining along the pale road, so that sometimes all you could see was the road, and the horizon it ran to. Sometimes she was overwhelmed by the green life passing in such hig.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 728aa18 | Planted rows went turning past like giant spokes one by one as they ranged the roads. The skies were interrupted by dark gray storm clouds with a flow like molten stone, swept and liquid, and light that found its way through them was lost in the dark fields but gathered shining along the pale road, so that sometimes all you could see was the road, and the horizon it ran to. Sometimes she was overwhelmed by the green life passing in such hig.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 3ea19d4 | Something, something like the silvering of a mirror, remained between them. If Dally wanted to throw herself into those arms in their carefully kept sleeves, she would not be pushed away, she was at least that sure, but past that, where all that ought to matter lay, she saw only a black-velvet absence of signs. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| c0f25a0 | Slothrop, who believes that women, like Martians, have antennas men do not, keeps an eye on her. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 39890fc | What's your name?" Oedipa said. "Winthrop Tremaine," replied the spirited entrepreneur, "Winner, for short. Listen, now we're getting up an arrangement with one of the big ready-to-wear outfits in L.A. to see how SS uniforms go for the fall. We're working it in with the back-to-school campaign, lot of 37 longs, you know, teenage kid sizes. Next season we may go all the way and get out a modified version for the ladies. How would that strike.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 1bc4a1a | But don't they look like apes, now, fighting over a female? Even if the female is named Liberty. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| dda6c13 | Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled streets and alleyways in a Cartesian grid, sketched in sepia, mile on mile. "The Great Bovine City of the World," breathed Lindsey in wonder. Indeed, the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human hats. From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in everchanging cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, .. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 1ef39ee | Zoyd remembered her...as a tall florid girl in a minidress that bore the image, from neck to hemline, of Frank Zappa's face, thus linking her in Zoyd's mind somehow with Mount Rushmore. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 472cc1b | Hand in hand with Brenda whom he'd met yesterday, Profane ran down the street. Presently, sudden and in silence, all illumination in Valletta, houselight and streetlight, was extinguished. Profane and Brenda continued to run through the abruptly absolute night, momentum alone carrying them toward the edge of Malta, and the Mediterranean beyond | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 63c913f | An old Gordita reflex, dating back to shortly after the Second World War, when a black family had actually tried to move into town and the citizens, with helpful advice from the Ku Klux Klan, had burned the place to the ground and then, as if some ancient curse had come into effect, refused to allow another house ever to be built on the site. The lot stood empty until the town finally confiscated it and turned it into a park, where the yout.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 0b4637a | Cyprian was captivated by eyes, but only by those that looked away, with either indifference or active distaste. It was not enough for her to return his gaze. She must then direct her own to other matters. It sent him into a swoon. It got him through that day and part of the next sometimes. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 54b93f2 | Tonight she'll be with Jeremy, her lieutenant, but she wants to be with Roger. Except that, really, she doesn't. Does she? She can't remember being so confused. When she is with Roger it's all love, but at any distance- any at all, Jack- she finds that he depresses and even frightens her. Why? On top of him in the wild nights riding up and down his cock her axis, trying herself to stay rigid enough not to turn to cream taper-wax and fall aw.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 47911af | Onto Chastity Bjornsen's car radio came the drawling irreverent brass and subhip syncopation of a Herb Alpert arrangement, which Doc realized with growing horror was a cover of Ohio Express's "Yummy Yummy Yummy." He" | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 6d0af2c | After that long of more named pavements than he'd care to count, Profane had grown a little leery of streets, especially streets like this. They had in fact all fused into a single abstracted Street, which come the full moon he would have nightmares about. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| cb10980 | It's a dangerous game Cherrycoke's playing here. Often he thinks the sheer volume of information pouring in through his fingers will saturate, burn him out...she seems determined to overwhelm him with her history and its pain, and the edge of it, always fresh from the stone, cutting at his hopes, at all their hopes. He does respect her: he knows that very little of this is female theatricals, really. She has turned her face, more than once,.. | futility-of-war indifference | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 2aea5f9 | The big scandal around IG Farben this week is the unlucky subsidiary Spottbilligfilm AG, whose entire management are about to be purged for sending to OKW weapons procurement a design proposal for a new airborne ray which could turn whole populations, inside a ten-kilometer radius, stone blind. An IG review board caught the scheme in time. Poor Spottbilligfilm. It had slipped their collective mind what such a weapon would do to the dye mark.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 6508f7e | Tonight she'll be with Jeremy, her lieutenant, but she wants to be with Roger. Except that, really, she doesn't. Does she? She can't remember being so confused. When she is with Roger it's all love, but at any distance- any at all, Jack- she finds that he depresses and even frightens her. Why? On top of him in the wild nights riding up and down his cock her axis, trying herself to stay rigid enough not to turn to cream taper-wax and fall aw.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 930e4b4 | The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator. | deception power | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 0b1adc0 | He sees her standing at the end of a passage in her life, without any next step to take--all her bets are in, she has only the tedium now of being knocked from one room to the next, a sequence of numbered rooms whose numbers do not matter, till inertia brings her to the last. That's all. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 8c318cc | Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the po.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| fcf4989 | The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of the machine-gun pattern. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a .. | futility-of-war war | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 00dc019 | the figure dropped like an acid tab into the mouth of Time. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 462687a | Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away. | capitalism control masochism sadism | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 1b16ea4 | We drank the blood of our enemies. That's why you see Gnostics so hunted. The sacrament of the Eucharist is really drinking the blood of the enemy. The Grail, the Sangraal, is the bloody vehicle. Why else guard it so sacredly? Why should the black honor-guard ride half a continent, half a splintering Empire, stone night and winter day, if it's only for the touch of sweet lips on a humble bowl? No, it's mortal sin they're carrying: to swallo.. | drinking-blood gnostic holy-grail mortal-sin | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 1458495 | Former and future nerdistocracy slowly, and to look at them you'd think reluctantly, filtering back out into the street, into the long September which has been with them in a virtual way since spring before last, continuing only to deepen. Putting their street faces back on for it. Faces already under silent assault, as if by something ahead, some Y2K of the workweek that no one is quite imagining, the crowds drifting slowly out into the li.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 0bc0761 | He is a messenger from Slothrop's innocent, pre-octopus past. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| c86a84a | There came to McClintic something it was time he got around to seeing: that 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. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 6c92359 | Profane had got into this way of thinking, and along with parties in the daytime and a rotating shift system devised by Bung the foreman whereby you didn't know till the day before which hours you would be working the next, it put him on a weird calendar which was not ruled off into neat squares at all but more a mosaic of tilted street-surfaces that changed position according to sunlight, streetlight, moonlight, nightlight... He wasn't com.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 1c8dee3 | Why? Why use the room as introduction to an apologia? Because the room, though windowless and cold at night, is a hothouse. Because the room is the past, though it has no history of its own. Because, as the physical being-there of a bed or horizontal plane determines what we call love; as a high place must exist before God's word can come to a flock and any sort of religion begin; so must there be a room, sealed against the present, before .. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| dfae2c1 | The gods help them that help themselves. | Aesop | ||
| 3b45642 | Union gives strength. | Aesop | ||
| 82fae98 | Five years Gebrail had hated them. Hated the stone buildings and metaled roads, the iron bridges and glass windows of Shepheard's Hotel which it seemed were only different forms of the dead sand that had taken his home. 'The city,' Gebrail often told his wife, just after admitting he'd come home drunk and just before beginning to yell at his children--the five of them curled blind in the windowless room above the barber like so many puppy-b.. | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 36372d1 | life is Vegas | Thomas Pynchon | ||
| 2135848 | She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity? | truth | Thomas Pynchon | |
| e89a7bc | trying not to get emotional but still hanging on the rearview mirror's single tale of recedings and vanishing points as we hang on looks our lovers give. | Thomas Pynchon |