Quotes from Thomas Pynchon

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.

How do you feel about this terrible thing? Terrible, said Oedipa. Wonderful!

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. . . 

Last apricot light flooded landward and brought their shadows uphill, past the lifeguard towers, into terraces of bougainvillea, rhododendrons, and ice plant.

As spread thighs are to the libertine...so was the letter V to young Stencil.

DON'T EVER ANTAGONIZE THE HORN.

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.

Could we have been so much in the midst of life? With such a sense of grand adventure about it all?

Man, I want to die, is all, cried Ploy. Don't you know, said Dahoud, that life is the most precious possession you have?

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.

When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face.

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

When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it with a transparent surface parallel to your own front that hums and bisects both your ears, making eyes very alert. The light bends toward chalky blue. Your skin aches. At last: something real.

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.

Strange, strange are the dynamics of oil and the ways of oilmen.

People who dress up in bizarre costumes have a savoir-vivre - not to mention the sort of personality disorder - that he admires.

It was as if whatever had happened had reached some kind of limit. It was like finding the gateway to the past unguarded, unforbidden because it didn't have to be. Built into the act of return finally was this glittering mosaic of doubt. Something like what Sauncho's colleagues in marine insurance liked to call inherent vice.

One minute you're gettin a nice blow job, the next it's like fuckin Vietnam, assault teams everyplace you look, scuba units climbin out of the Jacuzzi, chicks runnin around screaming. . . .

Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information machines.

Oh, THE WORLD OVER THERE, it's So hard to explain! Just-like, a dream's-got, lost in yer brain!

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.

The silences here are retreats of sound, like the retreat of the surf before a tidal wave: sound draining away, down slopes of acoustic passage, to gather, someplace else, to a great surge of noise.

She had heard all about excluded middles ; they were bad shit, to be avoided...

You're chicken, she told herself, snapping her seat belt. This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl.