Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ’n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek.

Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.