Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

There is a hotel close to here, the Esthonia, which penitents who come to us often make use of.

He understood that things were exactly what they were. It seemed more than he could bear.

one of those nights when he did not so much sleep as become intermittently conscious of time.

After Webb had gone on, the dog stood and barked for a while, not warning or angry, just being professional.

“Aitisi nai poroja,” replied Veikko, a pleasantry long grown routine, meaning, “Your mother fucks reindeer.”

Labor produces all wealth. Wealth belongs to the producer thereof.’

The once cheery mascotte had passed from political innocence, through a short period of adolescent uncertainty, into a distrust of authority approaching the very slopes of Nihilism.

“Explosion without an objective,” declared Miles Blundell, “is politics in its purest form.”

In the course of his Anarchist-hunting days in Chicago, Lew had found his way to a convenient insulation,

“It’s in this wonderful book I keep close to me all the time, A Modern Christian’s Guide to Moral Perplexities. Right here, on page eighty-six, is your answer. Do you have your pencil? Good, write this down—‘Dynamite Them All, and Let Jesus Sort Them Out.’”

“What you must do now, Lewis, as Querent, if you don’t mind, is to ask the cards for the answer to a specific question.” “Sure. How many Chinese living in South Dakota?”

Frank had a vision then, or whatever you call a vision when you hear instead of see it .

Time did not so much elapse as grow less relevant.

somebody’s child, not so much gone as consciously committing absence,

He woke knowing for the first time in a long time what he had to do. It was like having a stuffed sinus go away.

All the world in love with love, except it seemed for Kit, whose desires were consulted by no one, least of all himself.

But somehow, despite his low energy state and an attitude toward women that never got more comfortable than ambivalent, he was surprised to find his sexual interest kindled,

“But I can’t carry a tune in a bucket,” Foley pointed out, “and I don’t know the words.”

“For a long time I imagined her quite deep indeed,” said Hunter. “Then I saw that I was mistaking confusion for depth.

Kit understood for a moment that forms of life were a connected set—critters he was destined never to see existing so that those he did see would be just where they were, when he saw them.

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.

lately he was finding a perverse fascination in Patience, not so much as a virtue but more as a hobby requiring discipline, like chess or mountain-climbing.

cooing couple (whose chief distinction from pigeons, he reflected, must be that pigeons were more direct about shitting on one),

to feel a strangely familiar melancholy in the twilight that he couldn’t for a minute locate,

It was her old need for some kind of transcendence—the fourth dimension, the Riemann problem, complex analysis, all had presented themselves as routes of escape from a world whose terms she could not accept, where she had preferred that even erotic desire have no consequences, at least none as weighty as the desires for a husband and children and so forth seemed to be for other young women of the day.

taken from the dead, who had begun to appear in increasing numbers, like immigrants into a country where they were feared, disliked, pitilessly exploited.

“Over in Europe,” Ewball explained, “all busy killin each other over some snarled-up politics way beyond any easy understanding. But the minute they get over here, before you can say ‘Howdy,’ they just drop all those ancient hatreds, drop ’em flat, and become brothers-in-arms, ’cause they recognize this right away for just what it is.”

Before he left, he stole two .30-caliber machine-gun rounds, one for him and one for his Ma, believing that as long as these particular ones couldn’t be fired, he and Stray would be safe from harm.