Shadow Ticket Quotes

“Light sockets, vacuum cleaners, that general diameter, the minute it gets invented, some genius finds a way to put their johnson into it.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Maybe I should install a lens in my belly button, so I can see where I’m going with my head up my ass.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Some of us, if conscience had toenails, would be hanging on by just that margin. Yet conscience must find ways to go on operating inside history.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Does cheese, considered as a living entity, also possess consciousness?”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“In your investigations you cannot have failed to notice how often fathers and daughters are run by strange emotions, which, although occasionally dangerous, do continue to guarantee job security for us all.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“compliance is the price of liberty.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Hate to tell you but the only time ‘real’ comes into it is when they’re shooting at you. In practice, ‘real’ means dead—anything else, there’s always room for some conversation.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Gyros are forgiving ships, 90 percent foolproof - and there's the danger. The idiot appeal. Man in Indiana taught his dog how to fly one, now the dog flies him everywhere, a sky chauffeur, wears this li'l sort of outfit, hat, goggles, and so forth... Fools will flock to this machine, attracted by the simplicity of operation. Romance on the cheap. Too many will do things wrong and have accidents far enough short of tragic to give the rest of us a bad name, with insurance companies and loan officers suddenly all over the place.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Can you appreciate how infuriating?' a tendency to scream through his nose, 'how insulting to me personally, to, to be mentioned in the same breath with this feeble impersonation of a crime boss? To waste my talent not on an evil genius but on an evil moron, dangerous not for his intellect, what there may be of it, but for the power that his ill-deserved wealth allows him to exert, which his admirers pretend is will, though it never amounts to more than the stubbornness of a child...”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Last thing Hicks would want to admit hoping for, that he and April could've been another one of these couples hitchhiking together through the Depression, teamed up against each day and its troubles, each dusk out on some country road, thumbs at the ready, heading for who knows what waiting deeper for them in the night. Some dame, someday.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“In the business, we understand that an explosion, not always but sometimes, is actually somebody with something to say. Like, a voice, with a message we aren’t receiving so much as overhearing.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“You can’t go rescuing somebody and then just forget it—Ojibwe belief is, interfere with somebody’s life and you’re responsible for them forever—”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“The rhythm of the rails does nothing for Hicks the rest of the night but repeat wottachump, wottachump, wottachump till dawn, which arrives sometime between Harrisburg and Paoli.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Eternal youth, big Hollywood playpen, whatsoever—but someday they’ll lose that innocence. They’ll find out.” “Maybe they’ll keep finding new ways to be innocent.” Which got me a funny look. “Better if somebody tells you now—innocent and not guilty ain’t always the same.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“...old flames are a dime a dozen, West Madison of the labor market of love, sad, desperate, and cheap.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Everything the Al Capone of Cheez was Al Capone of is now in your hands, you’re the Alcaponissima.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“The Skipper tied up at a disused quay near Csepel, left a skeleton crew, and sent everybody else over on liberty and went on a meditative bender himself in Budapest, his thoughts far from festive. The city had a long history of suicide, attracting pilgrims from all over the world seeking a Lourdes not of hope but of despair, assuming that suicide in Budapest, like love in Paris or greed in New York, would be somehow more authentic.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Seems Ace has blown into Fiume aboard a 976 cc Royal Enfield plus sidecar, forced after a good deal of sentimental bikerly brooding to admit that this current ride is no substitute for his old Harley Flathead, which, though less of a coherent machine than a history of maintenance melodramas each waiting its turn to be enacted, he now misses heartbroken as a cowboy in a song, convinced by now that it is Bruno Airmont who’s responsible for its loss, seeing how it was Bruno who chased them into Vladboys territory to begin with, and thus obvious to anybody that Bruno must also bear the cost of its replacement, estimated at 200 quid, which Ace will accept in dollars, dinars, Reichsmarks, or if necessary—such is the state he’s worked himself up into—blood. “Actually I can do without the blood, too much cleanup, just the sucker’s head would be enough.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Meantime, if I knew you were this cold I’d’ve asked you to keep a bottle of beer for me close to your heart.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Soon as I can get hold of a tommy gun I’m just going out before breakfast and start shooting Fascists.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Congratulations, Cheez Princess, she snarls to herself, you’re about to become fondue.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Criminal code? Nemnemnem, too elaborate, first-degree this, second-degree that, too much paperwork… instead how about one penalty for everything—simple impalement! Murder, queue-jumping, double-dealing and false shuffles, easy to remember, no case law to look up, no judges to bribe, no lawyers’ fees—in fact, no lawyers! Find a stick, sharpen it, zzt! done in a flash, another of those reductions in government spending for which I have become famous. But do they ever call me Vlad the Spending Reducer? Not likely! Since I took power, the threat of Turkish invasion has fallen to zero—do they call me Vlad the Invasion Preventer? No…”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Take it from a longtime veteran of copydesks throughout the land,” advises Slide, “seen so many tough customers I could write you a bird book identifying all the different types, ain’t often comes along as deep of a desperado as Bruno Airmont. Maybe your grandma told you there’s some good in everybody? Well, Bruno in the neighborhood’ll even send Granny reachin for the squirrel rifle…”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Two different kinds of trouble, ain’t it, one you end up dead, the other dead and in hell.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“This here is the all-time definition of cute with a capital Q!”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket