The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

• “Even if enough exposure to the unvarying gray sickness had somehow managed to immunize him, 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.

• …fragile girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.

• “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 evindices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known then, because of a painting that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from noting, there’s been no escape.”

• “Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the kind of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?”

• “So hung up with words, words You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback you’re looking for, but –“ a hand emerged from the veil of shower-steam to indicate his suspended head— “in here. That’s what I’m for. To give the spirit flesh. The words, who care? They’re rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barriers around an actor’s memory, right? But the reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the close little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also.”

• “You could fall In love with me, you can talk to my shrink, you can hide a tape recorder in my bedroom, see what I talk about from wherever I am when I sleep. You want to do that? You can put together clues, develop a thesis, or several, about why characters reacted to the Tyrstero possibility the way they did, why the assassins came on, why the black costumes You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth. Wharfinger supplied words and a yarn. I gave them life. That’s it. “

• “But now it came to her, as if the rain whispered it…”

• “On the secular level all we can see is one piston, hopefully moving. One little movement, against all that massive complex of information, destroyed over and over with each power stroke.”

• “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…”

• “When those kids sing about ‘She loves you,’ yeah well, you know, she does, she’s any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the ‘you’ is everybody. And herself. Oedipa, the human voice, you know, it’s a flipping miracle.” His eyes brimming, reflecting the color of beer.”

• “Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia.”