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

“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

“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

“Two gates beginning to diverge— back to the U.S., marry, raise a family, assemble a life you can persuade yourself is free from fear, as meanwhile, over here, the other outcome continues to unfold, to roll in dark as the end of time. Those you could have saved, could’ve shifted at least somehow onto a safer stretch of track, are one by one robbed, beaten, killed, seized and taken away into the nameless, the unrecoverable. ‘Until one night, too late, you wake into an understanding of what you should have been doing with your life all along.’ Something like that. If anybody was still there to hear it. Which there isn’t.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“No more than idly cruising the countryside, Sándor happened to get off on one of those fateful back roads, and there in a steep farmyard were a family and their livestock, a cute meet, you’d say, though not half as cute as the pig herself. “Oh and this is Erzsébet, we’re eating her for Christmas.” Hell they are. Sándor and some barroom accomplices perform a snatch-and-grab in the middle of the night, the pig pretending to be asleep, as she is picked up, installed in the sidecar of Sándor’s rig, and spirited away, just like that. Next thing anybody knows she’s riding in the sidecar, done up in helmet and goggles, beaming, posing like a princess in a limousine. Anybody feels like commenting, they don’t.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Well so this is it, it now occurs to Hicks, actual Transylvania, the vampire motherland itself, not in movie black-and-white but autumn colors and countryside aromas, forests filled with shadow, early previews of the winter ahead. It rains and blows, and wolves come out and address the night, chamois pose up on ridgelines, farmers’ daughters who have let go of much of the cheerfulness of months earlier settle in again to ride out this particular pivot into darkness, as mountainsides in the distance go whitening each day, throwing strange, almost theatrical back and fill lighting to alter faces grown familiar over the summer.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Soon enough, however, the music has shifted grimly minor, as overhead now looms a giant soup ladle, about to dip down and scoop up one or more of the aqua-lovelies, as if, in the distant world from which the ladle has descended, they are considered edible delicacies. The girls cast theatrical glances skyward, scream, squeal, submerge in the soup trying to escape, yet smiling all through the shot, having just the greatest fun, while pretending to croon, in tight inside-the-octave harmony.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“A deep rumbling felt more than heard passes through the invisible world and around the edges of this one. From beyond any zone of civic safety something has begun to pulsate, soul-strumming and growing louder, finishing with a great thump reaching citywide.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“The shoreline rolls by, some cumulus in the west backlit by the setting sun, spirits, mixers, and chasers flow, and the dance orchestration includes both a full-keyboard accordion and a Chemnitzer concertina, which means every once in a while, between the slow dreamy numbers and the upbeat jingles about how great everything is these days, there’ll be polkas. Just in case anybody was thinking of wandering off and jumping overboard.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“The year 1930 happened to be the 1776 of the cheese business. The British company Lever Brothers merged with the Dutch cartel known as the Margarine Union to form Unilever. After the merger of National Dairy Products with Kraft everything avalanched, faster than anybody was ready for, climaxing in the Cheese Corridor Incursion, a wildcat operation denounced at the time variously as Bolshevik, cartel, or Capone-related though in fact nobody knew where it came from, a major sector of Wisconsin de-cheesed in the blink of an eye, entire cheese inventories hijacked right out the gates of more than one cheeseworks, from Sheboygan on west, one after the other, a coordinated rolling knock-over, truckloads of case-hardened palookas, many said to be from Illinois, trooping in and out of plants big and small, tossing provolones back and forth like footballs, rolling along the ground giant waxed wheels of domestic Parmesan, no cash taken, no payrolls, only physical cheese, Colby longhorns, bricks of Brick wrapped in tinfoil and carried away by the hodful, storming on down the Cheese Corridor in a bold sweep already “legend-dairy,” as newspaper extras were proclaiming before it was even over with. What didn’t get gobbled down on the spot or stashed for further aging in caves at secret locations was quickly distributed among lunch wagons, soup kitchens, one-arm joints throughout the upper Midwest, effectively down the hatches of the hungry inside of forty-eight hours.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Cheese, oh to be sure, cheese is alive. Self-aware, actually, maybe not exactly the way we are, but still more than some clever simulation. We’re at a pivot point here in the history of food science, a strange new form of life that was deliberately invented, like Doctor Frankenstein or something”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Social chitchat around here, as he learns from falling into conversation with a number of eccentric Airmont cousins wandering around without much to do, seems very focused on cheese, in particular the recent Bruno Airmont Dairy Metaphysics Symposium held annually at the Department of Cheese Studies at the UW branch in Sheboygan, this year featuring the deep and perennial question, “Does cheese, considered as a living entity, also possess consciousness?”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“But if a human soul can be defined as a structure of memories, if to ‘read’ an object is somehow to gain access to what it remembers, then how can we begrudge it a soul?”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“Too bad. Sometimes it takes no more than lightly touching an object to read the traces of where it’s been and who with and what they’ve been up to. We want to believe that objects are pure, innocent, when the truth is that they lie open to every vibration that comes their way, law-abiding, criminal, everything in between…”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket