Thomas Pynchon

Can't say it often enough - change your hair, change your life.

You felt she'd done a thousand secret things to her eyes. They needed no haze of cigarette smoke to look at you out of sexy and fathomless, but carried their own along with them. New York must have been for her a city of smoke, its streets the courtyards of limbo, its bodies like wraiths. Smoke seemed to be in her voice, in her movements; making her all the more substantial, more there, as if words, glances, small lewdnesses could only become baffled and brought to rest like smoke in her long hair; remain there useless till she released them, accidentally and unknowingly, with a toss of her head.

One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living... and with each one, he thinks he feels patterns on his cortex going dark, settling to sleep forever, parts of whoever he's been losing all definition, reverting to dumb chemistry...

Nobody wanted to hear about all the Preterite, the many God passes over when he chooses a few for salvation. William argued holiness for these "second Sheep," without whom there'd be no elect. You can bet the Elect in Boston were pissed off about that. And it got worse. William felt that what Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot was for the Preterite. Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart. How can Jesus be an exception? could we feel for him anything but horror in the face of the unnatural, the extracreational? Well, if he is the son of man, and if what we feel is not horror but love, then we have to love Judas too. Right? How William avoided being burned for heresy, nobody knows.

Could he have been the fork in the road American never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropite heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper? Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot? It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back--maybe that anarchist he met in Zurich was right, maybe for a little while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared...

There are places we fear, places we dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, sometimes, too late.

The Doper's DreamLast night I dreamed I was plugged right inTo a bubblin' hookah so high,When all of a sudden some Arab jinniJump up just a-winkin' his eye.'I'm here to obey all your wishes,' he told me.As for words I was trying to grope.'Good buddy,' I cried, 'you could surely oblige meBy turning me on to some dope!'With a bigfat smile he took ahold of my hand,And we flew down the sky in a flash,And the first thing I saw in the land where he took meWas a whole solid mountain of hash!All the trees was a-bloomin' with pink 'n' purple pills,Whur the Romilar River flowed by,To the magic mushrooms as wild as a rainbow,So pretty that I wanted to cry.All the girls come to greet us, so sweet in slow motion,Mourning glories woven into their hair,Bringin' great big handfuls of snowy cocaine,All their dope they were eager to share.We we dallied for days, just a-ballin' and smokin',In the flowering Panama Red,Just piggin' on peyote and nutmeg tea,And those brownies so kind to your head.Now I could've passed that good time forever,And I really was fixing to stay,But you know that jinni turned out, t'be a narco man,And he busted me right whur I lay.And he took me back to a cold, cold world'N' now m'prison's whurever I be...And I dream of the days back in DoperlandAnd I wonder, will I ever go free?

As if somehow irony,_ she recaps for Maxine, __s practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious _ weakening its grip on __eality._ So all kinds of make-believe__orget the delusional state the country__ in already__ust suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now.___eah, the kids are even getting it at school._ Ms. Cheung, an English teacher who if Kugelblitz were a town would be the neighborhood scold, has announced that there shall be no more fictional reading assignments. Otis is terrified, Ziggy less so. Maxine will walk in on them watching Rugrats or reruns of Rocko__ Modern Life, and they holler by reflex, __on__ tell Ms. Cheung!___ou notice,_ Heidi continues, __ow __eality_ programming is suddenly all over the cable, like dog shit? Of course, it__ so producers shouldn__ have to pay real actors scale. But wait! There__ more! Somebody needs this nation of starers believing they__e all wised up at last, hardened and hip to the human condition, freed from the fictions that led them so astray, as if paying attention to made-up lives was some form of evil drug abuse that the collapse of the towers cured by scaring everybody straight again.

There are two more turds, smaller ones, and when he has eaten these, residual shit to lick out of her anus. He prays that she'll let him drop the cape over himself, to be allowed, in the silk-lined darkness, to stay a while longer with his submissive tongue straining upward into her asshole. But she moves away. The fur evaporates from his hands. She orders him to masturbate for her. She has watched Captain Blicero with Gottfried, and has learned the proper style.

Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.

Shit, money, and the World, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country's fate. But they did not prosper... about all they did was persist

The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator.

Beneath the rubato of the day abided a stern pulse beating on, ineluctable, unforgiving, whereby whatever was evaded or put off now had to be made up for later, and at a higher level of intensity.

Let the peace of this day be here tomorrow when I wake up.

All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.

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 market after the next war.

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 moment's weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War cannot use, and so they die. The right ones survive. The others, it's said, even know they have a short life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way that they do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate them completely? Then no one would have to be killed in the War.

It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted _ secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology _ by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, __oney be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,_ but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night__ blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more _ The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms _ it was only staged to look that way _ but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite _