Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

One of the dearest Postwar hopes: that there should be no room for a terrible disease like charisma . . .

“think I’m catching a cold.” You’re catching the War. It’s infecting you and I don’t know how to keep it away. Oh, Jess. Jessica. Don’t leave me. . . .

wanted Shell to develop a rocket engine that would run on something besides cordite, which was being used in those days to blow up various sorts of people at the rate of oodles ’n’ oodles of tons an hour, and couldn’t be spared for rockets.

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.

All the neuroses about property gathered strength, and began to infect the countryside. Fences went up, and the gaucho became less free. It is our national tragedy. We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide that openness: it is terror to us.

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

All anyone knows about you is that you keep showing up.”

when I watch people, I feel less alone.” “W’l hell, Ensign . . . why don’tcha just. . . join in? They’re always lookin’ fer . . . company.” “Oh, my goodness,” grinning one of them big polyhedral Jap grins, like they do, “then I would feel more alone.”