So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence โ not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be โ its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.
Thomas PynchonThere is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made โ at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.
Thomas PynchonBut a few choosing to venture deeper into the painful corridors of their affliction, found after a while that they could now grind and polish ever more exotic surfaces, hyperboloidial and even stranger, eventually including what we must term โimaginaryโ shapes (which some preferred to term invisible).
Thomas Pynchon