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.
A woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.
Each day the mythical return Enzian dreamed of seems less possible. Once it was necessary to know uniforms, insignia, airplane markings, to observe boundaries. But by now too many choices have been made. The single root lost, way back there in the May desolation. Each bird has his branch now, and each one is the Zone.
How many times, continued Lindsay Noseworth, second-in-command here and known for his impatience with all manifestations of the slack, have you been warned, Suckling, against informality of speech?
How they persist. The poor, the black. And the Jews! The Welsh, the Welsh once upon a time were Jewish too? one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, a black tribe, who wandered overland, centuries? oh an incredible journey. Until at last they reached Wales, you see.
And what we've been always been is…?
She waited, guttering with a small meek defiance, standing at the window and trembling, moonlight from a high angle pouring over her naked back, casting on it shadows of her shoulder blades, like healed stumps of wings ritually amputated once long ago, for some transgression of the Angels' Code.
There are places we fear, places we dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, sometimes, too late.
Reef lit a hemp-and-tobacco cigarette and reviewed his situation, while around him infectious melodies and rhythms went on refashioning the night.
Why should things be easy to understand?
The history of the old Hereros is one of lost messages. It began in mythical times, when the sly hare who nests in the Moon brought death among men, instead of the Moon's true message. The true message has never come.
Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek.
Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.
For me, Shambhala, you see, turned out to be not a goal but an absence. Not the discovery of a place but the act of leaving the futureless place where I was. And in the process I arrived at Constantinople.
Remember, she who keepeth the Books runneth the Business.
Everything is some kind of a plot, man.
When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it with a transparent surface parallel to your own front that hums and bisects both your ears, making eyes very alert. The light bends toward chalky blue. Your skin aches. At last: something real.
Grownups acting like the worst kind of kids, kids acting like they knew what was going on.
Darkness invades the dreams of the glassblower. Of all the unpleasantries his dreams grab in out of the night air, an extinguished light is the worst. Light in his dreams, was always hope: the basic moral hope. As the contacts break helically away, hope turns to darkness, and the glassblower wakes sharply tonight crying, Who? Who?
It was the end of something—if not his innocence, at least of his faith that things would always happen gradually enough to afford time to do something about it in.
Not that the crew of the Toiletship itself were above a practical joke now and then.
A pneumatic toy frog hops onto a lily pad, trembling. Beneath the surface, lies terror.
Not everybody benefits from a misspent youth.
You came to talk about the play," he said. "Let me discourage you. It was written to entertain people. Like horror movies. It isn't literature, it doesn't mean anything. Wharfinger was no Shakespeare." "Who was he?" she said. "Who was Shakespeare? It was a long time ago.
Perhaps it's theater, but they SEEM no longer to be Allies...though the history they have invented for themselves conditions us to expect "postwar rivalries," when in fact it may all be a giant cartel including winners and losers both, in an amiable agreement to share what is there to be shared...
Not me, paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much.
It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.
But then last September the rockets came. Them fucking rockets. You couldn't adjust to the bastards.
Words are only and eye-twitch away from the things they stand for.
Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information machines.
For about ten minutes the vengeful crew proceed to maim, strangle, poison, burn, stomp, blind and otherwise have at Pasquale, while he describes intimately his varied sensations for our enjoyment.
To those of us who survived [...], it also means that we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid.
They talked in the car always, he trying to find the key to her own ignition behind the hooded eyes, she sitting back of the right-hand steering wheel and talking, talking, nothing but MG-words, inanimate-words he couldn't really talk back at. Soon.
At the corner store they invaded a hot dog stand and drank pina colada to sober up. It did no good.
Each is a cold announcement of dead ends, suns that will refuse to stand, but flee south, ever south, leaving us to north-without-end.
All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic.
C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre (attributed to a French observer during the Charge of the Light.
People who dress up in bizarre costumes have a savoir-vivre - not to mention the sort of personality disorder - that he admires.
Anyone who wonders what Imps look like in their Middle Years would be perhaps more than satisfied with Shelby's Phiz at the moment,— Malice undiminish'd, with a Daily Schedule that leaves him too little time to express it.
What was walking on water, if it wasn't Bible talk for surfing?
What happens to men sometimes,' his father wants to tell Charlie, 'is that one day all at once they'll understand how much they love their children, as absolutely as a child gives away its own love, and the terrible terms that come with that,— and it proves too much to bear, and they'll not want it, any of it, and they'll back away in fear.
She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity?
They'd never heard it that way. Went on warming their hands at an invisible fire. Oedipa, to retaliate, stopped believing in them.
You're so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew.
Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself.
We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero.
'Recluse' is a code word generated by journalists... meaning, 'doesn't like to talk to reporters.'
Soon the mercilessly even drumbeat fill'd the Day, replacing the accustom'd rhythms of country People with the controlling Pulse of military Clock-Time, announcing that all events would now occur at the army's Pleasure, upon the army's schedule.
