Historical Novelists

"She might have found the Tristero anywhere in her Republic, through any of a hundred lightly-concealed entranceways, a hundred alienations, if only she'd looked. She stopped for a minute between the steel rails, raising her head as if to sniff the air. Becoming conscious of the hard, strung presence she stood on — knowing as if maps had been flashed for her on the sky how these tracks ran on into others, others, knowing they laced, deepened, authenticated the great night around her. If only she'd looked. … She remembered drifters she had listened to, Americans speaking their language carefully, scholarly, as if they were in exile from somewhere else invisible yet congruent with the land she lived in; and walkers along the roads at night, zooming in and out of your headlights without looking up, too far from any town to have a real destination. And the voices before and after the dead man's that had phoned at random during the darkest slowest hours, searching ceaseless among the dial's ten million possibilities for that magical Other who would reveal herself out of the roar of relays monotone litanies of insult, filth, fantasy love, whose brute repetition must someday call into being the trigger of the unnamable act, the recognition, the Word."

"“Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person’s time line sideways till they all coincide."

"“I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy. "Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”"

"You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there’s cataclysm."

"Teamwork," Koteks snarled, "is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It's a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society."

"I was dreaming … about my grandfather. A very old man, at least as old as I am now, 91. I thought, when I was a boy, that he had been 91 all his life. Now I feel as if I have been 91 all my life."

"Pynchon is … the only contemporary author whose novels can be compared to James Joyce's with a straight face. … Whatever meanings and complex messages may lie hidden in Pynchon's text can, for now, be left to develop subconsciously as the reader enjoys the more immediate rewards of the work of a consummate storyteller. Pynchon is one, and he never quite lets you forget that while this might be an epic story, it's an epic story told to wide-eyed children who are up past their bedtime."

"Thomas Pynchon is an enigma shrouded in a mystery veiled in anonymity. … He so shuns publicity that he doesn't allow his likeness to be used on book jackets. All known photographs of the man date to the early 1950s. … Some of his fans wonder if he really exists or might really be several people writing under a pseudonym. … He has proven himself willing to step out of the shadows from time to time — but on his own terms."

"[Johns] Hopkins had this very postmodernist slant. You couldn't help but be really influenced by this emphasis on the text, on experimental texts. People were fascinated with Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon, and John Barth was there, and the focus was on that, which I found very helpful."

"Paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much."

"Everybody here drove around like a dedicated loser, expecting moment to moment to get into an accident. Doc could relate to this — it was like the beach, where you lived in a climate of unquestioning hippie belief, pretending to trust everybody while always expecting to be sold out — but he didn't have to enjoy that either, especially."

"I apologize if I've interrupted some exceptionally demanding hippie task, like trying to remember where the glue is on the Zig-Zag paper, but it seems we have yet another problem, not unconnected with this fatality of yours for introducing disaster into every life you touch, however glancingly."

"It creeped him out, the way it just sat there looking so plastic and harmless among the old-time good intentions of all that downtown architecture, no more sinister than a chain motel by the freeway, and yet behind its neutral drapes and far away down its fluorescent corridors it was swarming with all this strange alternate cop history and cop politics—cop dynasties, cop heroes and evildoers, saintly cops and psycho cops, cops too stupid to live and cops too smart for their own good—insulated by secret loyalties and codes of silence from the world they'd all be given to control, or, as they liked to put it, protect and serve."

"Charlie really has this, like, obsessive death wish! Yes! he, he wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty, man, deep parable of consumer capitalism, they won't be happy with anything less than drift-netting us all, chopping us up and stacking us on the shelves of Supermarket Amerika, and subconsciously the horrible thing is, is we want them to do it..."

"It went on for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day."

"All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality."

"If the U.S. was a person," he later became fond of saying, "and it sat down, Columbus, Ohio would instantly be plunged into darkness"

"It was impossible to get a decent meal, or even snack, anywhere, burned flapjacks and vulcanized steaks being as appetizing as things got. It also quickly became evident — horribly evident — that no one in the city knew how to make coffee, as if there were some sort of stultified consensus, or even city ordinance, about never waking up."

"Merle's all-night illumination prolonged itself into an inescapable glow that began to keep him awake."

"At Bishop they learn'd that Dixon had been buried in back of the Quaker Meeting-House in Staindrop. Doctor Isaac stay'd with his Father, step for step. At the grave, which by Quaker custom was unmark'd, Mason beseech'd what dismally little he knew of God, to help Dixon through. The grass was long and beaded with earlier rain. A Cat emerg'd from it and star'd for a long time, appearing to know them. "Dad?" Doc had taken his arm. For an instant, unexpectedly, Mason saw the little Boy who, having worried about Storms at Sea, as Beasts in the Forest, came running each time to make sure his father had return'd safely, — whose gift of ministering to others Mason was never able to see, let alone accept, in his blind grieving, his queasiness of Soul before a life and a death, his refusal to touch the Baby, tho' 'twas not possible to blame him.... The Boy he had gone to the other side of the Globe to avoid was looking at him now with nothing in his face but concern for his Father. "Oh, Son." He shook his Head. He didn't continue. "It's your Mate," Doctor Isaac assur'd him, "It's what happens when your Mate dies.""

"It is usually not wise to discuss matters of costume with people like this, — politics or religion being far safer topicks."

"Have you ever fall'n into one of those Cometary Dazes, with the way the Object grows brighter and brighter each night? These Apparitions in the Sky, we never observe them but in Motion, — gone in seconds, and if they return, we do not see them. Once safely a part of the Night Sky, they may hang there at their Pleasure, performing whatever their Work corresponds to shifting jibs and stay-sails, keeping perfectly upon Station, mimicking any faint, unnam'd Star you please. Do they watch us? Are they visits from the past, from an Age of Faith, when Miracles still literally happen'd?"

"Now, nothing in the Sky looks the same. "As to the Comet, — I cannot account for how, — but there came this night, to this boggy Miasmatick place, an exceptional Clarity of the Air, … a sort of optickal Tension among the Stars, that seem'd ever just about to break radiantly thro'… And there. In Leo, bright-man'd, lo, it came. It came ahead. And 'twould be but Prelude to the Finger of Corsica, — which now appear'd, pointing down from Heaven. And the place where it pointed was the place I knew I must journey to, for beneath the Sky-borne Index lay, as once beneath a Star, an Infant that must, again, re-make the World, — this time 'twas a Sign from Earth, not only from Heaven, showing the way."

"No need to feel pleas'd with yourself. What you found was not their sacred Well, but only a Representation of it."

"What, a Re-Peat!"

""Arrh! Stars and Mud, ever conjugate, a Paradox to consider, — one…for the Astronomer-Royal, perhaps?" His current scheme being, to assail Maskelyne's Sanity, by now and then posing to him Questions that will not bear too much cogitating upon, — most lately, Über Bernouillis Brachistochronsprobleme, 1702 by Baron von Boppdörfer ("Mind like a Spanish Blade. Read it at the Risk of your Self-Esteem.") having almost done the Trick."

"If America was a person, — and it sat down, — Lancaster town would be plunged into a Darkness unbreathable."

"Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power, — who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government."

"Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers, — Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin… Alas the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers, — nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other, — her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit, — that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever, — not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All, — rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in Common."

"Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware, — the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking'd foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of various Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel'd Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar, — the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax'd and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy Advent, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults."

"LATER than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof. In his dream these had been carrier pigeons from someplace far across the ocean, landing and taking off again one by one, each bearing a message for him, but none of whom, light pulsing in their wings, he could ever quite get to in time. He understood it to be another deep nudge from forces unseen, almost surely connected with the letter that had come along with his latest mental-disability check, reminding him that unless he did something publicly crazy before a date now less than a week away, he would no longer qualify for benefits. He groaned out of bed."

"A million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it."

"No, as none of these, but instead a point in space, a point hung precise as the point where burning must end, never launched, never to fall. And what is the specific shape whose center of gravity is the Brennschluss Point? Don't jump at an infinite number of possible shapes. There's only one. It is most likely an interface between one order of things and another. There's a Brennschluss point for every firing site. They still hang up there, all of them, a constellation waiting to have a 13th sign of the Zodiac named for it..."

"You." A finger the size of a corncob, an inch from Slothrop's nose. ... "Look," Slothrop's friend producing a kraft-paper envelope that even in the gloom Slothrop can tell is fat with American Army yellow-seal scrip, "I want you to hold this for me, till I ask for it back. It looks like Italo is going to get here before Tamara, and I'm not sure which one" "At this rate, Tamara's gonna get here before tonight," Slothrop interjects in a Groucho Marx voice. "Don't try to undermine my confidence in you," advises the Large One. "You're the man."

"Non-Masons stay pretty much in the dark about What Goes On, though now and then something jumps out, exposes itself, jumps giggling back again, leaving you with few details but a lot of Awful Suspicions."

""The edge of evening … the long curve of people all wishing on the first star.... Always remember those men and women along the thousands of miles of land and sea. The true moment of shadow is the moment in which you see the point of light in the sky. The single point, and the Shadow that has just gathered you in its sweep ..." Always remember. The first star hangs between his feet. Now —"

"I did not write those letters. This has been a hoax that I've had nothing to do with. I'm sorry it's gone on as long as it has."

"My belief is that "recluse" is a code word generated by journalists... meaning, "doesn't like to talk to reporters.""

"Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed."

"Why should things be easy to understand?"

"When Marilyn Monroe got out of the game, I wrote something like, "Southern California's special horror notwithstanding, if the world offered nothing, nowhere to support or make bearable whatever her private grief was, then it is that world, and not she, that is at fault." I wrote that in the first few shook-up minutes after hearing the bulletin sandwiched in between Don and Phil Everly and surrounded by all manner of whoops and whistles coming out of an audio signal generator, like you are apt to hear on the provincial radio these days. But I don't think I'd take those words back. The world is at fault, not because it is inherently good or bad or anything but what it is, but because it doesn't prepare us in anything but body to get along with. Our souls it leaves to whatever obsolescences, bigotries, theories of education workable and un, parental wisdom or lack of it, happen to get in its more or less Brownian (your phrase) pilgrimage between the cord-cutting ceremony and the time they slide you down the chute into the oven, while the guy on the Wurlitzer plays Aba Daba Honeymoon because you had once told somebody it was the nadir of all American expression; only they didn't know what nadir meant but it must be good because of the vehemence with which you expressed yourself."

"You don’t understand,” getting mad. “You guys, you’re like Puritans are about the Bible. 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 cares? They’re rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barrier around an actor’s memory, right? But the reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also."

""You one of those right wing nut outfits?" inquired the diplomatic Metzger. Fallopian twinkled. "They accuse us of being paranoids." "They?" inquired Metzger, twinkling also. "Us?" asked Oedipa."

"There'd been no escape. What did she so desire to escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: and what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited upon her from outside and for no reason at all. 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 disc jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?"

"In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” were a number of frail 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 the tapestry, and the tapestry was the world."

"She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. 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. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding."

""Run away with me," said Roseman when the coffee came. "Where?" she asked. That shut him up."

"A number of frail girls... 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."

"For a boy not getting any he had more woman problems than anybody he knew."

"Right and left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouse of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets manipulated by mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future."