Quotes from Thomas Pynchon

Two of them there drinking red liquor like it was sadness medicine.

Slothrop, who believes that women, like Martians, have antennas men do not, keeps an eye on her.

And over my head," relates Squire Haligast, "it form'd an E-clipse, an emptiness in the Sky, with a Cloud-shap'd Line drawn all about it, wherein words might appear, and it read,— 'No King . . .

Together they are a long skin interface, flowing sweat, close as muscles and bones can press, hardly a word beyond her name, or his.

It is the dark, hard, tobacco-starved, headachey, sour-stomached, middle of the day, a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them know it, many about now are already onto the second or third pint or highball glass, which produces a certain desperate aura here.

They'd never heard it that way. Went on warming their hands at an invisible fire. Oedipa, to retaliate, stopped believing in them.

Neither of them had ever had much interest in breaking each other's heart. In theory they both knew she had to move on, though all he wanted right now was to wait, even just another day. But he knew that feeling, and he guessed it would pass.

Will Postwar be nothing but "events," newly created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?

Reef lit a hemp-and-tobacco cigarette and reviewed his situation, while around him infectious melodies and rhythms went on refashioning the night.

In the buses all night she listened to transistor radios playing songs in the lower stretches of the Top 200, that would never become popular, whose melodies and lyrics would perish as if they had never been sung. A Mexican girl, trying to hear one of these through snarling static from the bus's motor, hummed along as if she would remember it always, tracing post horns and hearts with a fingernail, in the haze of her breath on the window.

They talked in the car always, he trying to find the key to her own ignition behind the hooded eyes, she sitting back of the right-hand steering wheel and talking, talking, nothing but MG-words, inanimate-words he couldn't really talk back at. Soon

Social Darwinists of the day were forever on about the joys of bloody teeth and claws, but they were curiously uncelebratory of speed and deception, poison and surprise.

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

Fuck you," whispers Slothrop. It's the only spell he knows, and a pretty good all-purpose one at that.

And what we've always been is. . .? Is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who's paying for it, who's starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs. . .planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering...

The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had.

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre

How strange tonight, this city. As if something trembled below its surface, waiting to burst through.

She waited, guttering with a small meek defiance, standing at the window and trembling, moonlight from a high angle pouring over her naked back, casting on it shadows of her shoulder blades, like healed stumps of wings ritually amputated once long ago, for some transgression of the Angels' Code.

There's never much talk but touches and looks, smiles together, curses for parting. It is marginal, hungry, chilly—most times they're too paranoid to risk a fire—but it's something they want to keep, so much that to keep it, they will take on more than propaganda has ever asked them for. They are in love. Fuck the war.

as if a plunge toward dawn indefinite black hours long would indeed be necessary

Nobody here wants Competition,' Ives LeSpark re-entering, shaking his head gravely. 'All wish but to name their Price, and maintain it, without the extra work and worry all these damn'd Up-starts require.

He had known for a while that certain episodes he dreamed could not be his own.

It's what they've got planned for this whole town, a big Disneyland imitation of itself. Wholesome family fun, kiddies in the casinos, Go Fish with a table limit of ten cents, Pat Boone for a headliner, nonunion actors playing funny mafiosi, driving funny old-fashioned cars, making believe rub each other out, blam, blam, ha, ha, ha. LasfuckinVegasland.