Keep cool but care.
In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where’s his basis for comparing?
She drove like one of the damned on holiday.
Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.
He is suddenly, dodderer and ass, taken by an ache in his skin, a simple love for them both that asks nothing but their safety, and he’ll always manage to describe as something else – ‘concern,’ you know, ’fondness...
What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not the still photograph of finished character but the movie, the soul in flux.
I still don’t even know for sure what a tendril is.
They’d never heard it that way. Went on warming their hands at an invisible fire. Oedipa, to retaliate, stopped believing in them.
You never want to see kids repeat your own mistakes.
If he is going into management, he writes. If he is an engineer or architect why he paints or sculpts. He will straddle the line, aware up to the point of knowing he is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why there should ever be a line, or even if there is a line at all.
That, indeed, the Home Front is something of a fiction and lie, designed, not too subtly, to draw them apart, to subvert love in favor of work, abstraction, required pain, bitter death.
A pneumatic toy frog hops onto a lily pad, trembling. Beneath the surface, lies terror.
Runners are bouncing up and down at the curb waiting for lights to change. Cops are in coffee shops dealing with bagel deficiencies.
That night she sat for hours, too numb to even drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vaccum. For this, oh God, was the void.
No matter how the official narrative of this turns out,” it seemed to Heidi, “these are the places we should be looking, not in newspapers or television but at the margins, graffiti, uncontrolled utterances, bad dreamers who sleep in public and scream in their sleep.
Damn you all. You have no idea what you’re heading into. This world you take to be ‘the’ world will die, and descend into Hell, and all history after that will belong properly to the history of Hell.
Poetry is not communication with angels or with the “subconscious.” It is communication with the guts, genitals, and five portals of sense. Nothing more.
At the corner store they invaded a hot dog stand and drank pina colada to sober up. It did no good.
But Lord Blatherard Osmo was able at last to devote all of his time to Novi Pazar. Early in 1939, he was discovered mysteriously suffocated in a bathtub full of tapioca pudding, at the home of a Certain Viscountess. Some have seen in this the hand of the Firm.
You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out.