So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.
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 PynchonWhatโs this? What are the antagonists doing here โ infiltrating their own audience? Well, theyโre not really. Itโs somebody elseโs audience at the moment, and these nightly spectacles are an appreciable part of the darkside hours of life of the rocket capital. The chances for any paradox here, really, are less than you think.
Thomas PynchonYou know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another worldโs intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch thereโs cataclysm.
Thomas PynchonHe gazes through sunlight's buttresses, back down the refectory at the others, wallowing in their plenitude of bananas, thick palatals of their hunger lost somewhere in the stretch of morning between them and himself. A hundred miles of it, so suddenly. Solitude, even among the meshes of this war, can when it wishes so take him by the blind gut and touch, as now, possessively. Pirate's again some other side of a window, watching strangers eat breakfast.
Thomas Pynchon