"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 early 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 "(805).
Thomas Pynchon
Against The Day (2006)
"Then each time Fleetwood would be not so much overcome by remorse as bedazzled at having been shown the secret backlands of wealth, and how sooner or later it depended on some act of murder, seldom limited to once" (170).
"Like it or not, he had joined the company of those who follow their hunches directly to bottoms of barrels and end of lines…" (282).
"Time as it commonly passes here, above this galley-slave repetition of days… "(617).
" Kit had half come to hope that someday, in some dreamed future, when his silence had grown plausible to pearl Street, then would have been his moment to return, agent at last for Webb’s vengeful ghost, return to daylit America, its practical affairs, its steadfast denial of night. Where acts such as the one he contemplated were given no name but “Terror,” because the language of that place—he might no longer say “home”—possessed no others" (723).
“Not quite how it sorts out. Differences among the world religions are in fact rather trivial when compared to the common enemy, the ancient and abiding darkness which all hate, fear, and struggle against without cease…Shamanism. There isn’t a primitive people anywhere on Earth that can’t be found practicing some form of it. Every state religion, including your own, considers it irrational and pernicious, and has taken steps to eradicate it.”
“What? There’s no ‘state religion’ in the U.S.A., pardner, we’ve got freedom of worship, it’s guaranteed in the Constitution—keeps church and state separate, just so’s we don’t turn into something like England and keep marching off into the brush with bagpipes and Gatling guns, looking for more infidels to wipe out. Nothing personal o’ course.”
“The Cherokee,” replied Prance,
“the Apache, the massacre of the Sioux Ghost Dancers at
“That was about land,” said Kit.
“I suggest it was about the fear of medicine men and
strange practices, dancing and drug-taking, that allow humans to be in touch
with the powerful gods hiding in the landscape, with no need of any official
church to mediate it for them. The only drug
you’ve ever been comfortable with is alcohol, so you went in and poisoned the
tribes with that.
Your whole history in
“The Civil War? That was economics. Politics.”
“That was the gods you tried to destroy, waiting their hour, taking their revenge. You people really believe everything you’re taught, don’t you?
"The hope it ignited was unexpected—almost, in her
life at the moment, unaffordable. But
hadn’t she just been out in the