Ploy > Ploy's Quotes

“I desire therefore I exist.”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“I think I want to be in love with you but I don't know how.”
― Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop

“Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.”
― Pearl S. Buck

“San Narciso lay further south, near L.A. Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts—census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.... Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy of America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only wa[y] she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“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. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she’d wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had take her away from nothing, there’d been no escape. What did she so desire 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: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on 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 disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“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.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“She moved through it carrying her fat book, attracted, unsure, a stranger, wanting to feel relevant but knowing how much of a search among alternative universes it would take.”
― Pynchon, Vente à la criée du lot 49

“Oedipa resolved to pull in at the next motel she saw, however ugly, stillness and four walls having at some point become preferable to this illusion of speed, freedom, wind in your hair, unreeling landscape—it wasn’t. What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain. But were Oedipa some single melted crystal of urban horse, L.A., really, would be no less turned on for her absence.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all”
― Susan Sontag

“Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.”
― Susan Sontag

“It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“Passion paralyzes good taste.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.”
― Susan Sontag

“One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.”
― Susan Sontag, Literature Is Freedom

“I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.”
― Susan Sontag