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Book: Vineland
Quotes of Book: Vineland

Thomas Pynchon _ Vineland
Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for, and though it kills me to say it, it's what rock and roll is becoming - just another way to claim our attention, so that beautiful certainty we had starts to fade, and after a while they have us convinced all over again that we really are going to die. And they've got us again.
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Thomas Pynchon _ Vineland
It would all be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence. If patterns of ones and zeroes were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level, at least -- an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name -- its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of history of the world. We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to sort of a standard gospel tune, And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.
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Thomas Pynchon _ Vineland
...trying not to get emotional but still hanging on the rearview mirror's single tale of recedings and vanishing points as we hang on looks our lovers give.
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Thomas Pynchon _ Vineland
life is Vegas
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Thomas Pynchon _ Vineland
Zoyd remembered her...as a tall florid girl in a minidress that bore the image, from neck to hemline, of Frank Zappa's face, thus linking her in Zoyd's mind somehow with Mount Rushmore.
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Thomas Pynchon _ Vineland
...grownups acting like the worst kind of kids, kids acting like they knew what was going on.
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Thomas Pynchon _ Vineland
The smartest kid Justin ever met, back in kindergarten, had told him to pretend his parents were characters in a television sitcom. 'Pretend there's a frame around 'em like the Tube, pretend they're a show you're watching. You can go into it if you want, or you can just watch and not go into it.
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Thomas Pynchon _ Vineland
This is just how they want you, an animal, a bitch with swollen udder lying in the dirt, blank-faced, surrendered, reduced to this meat, these smells...
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Thomas Pynchon _ Vineland
It's wrong because if you pick up a rifle, the Man picks up a machine gun, by the time you find some machine gun he's all set up to shoot rockets, begin to see a pattern?
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Thomas Pynchon _ Vineland
Here was world of simplicity and certainty no acidhead, no revolutionary anarchist would ever find, a world based on the one and zero of life and death. Minimal, beautiful. The patterns of life and deaths...
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Thomas Pynchon _ Vineland
Communists then, dopers now, tomorrow, who knew, maybe the faggots, so what, it was all the same beef wasn't it? Anybody looking like a normal American but living a secret life was always good for a pop if times got slow- easy and cost-effective, that was simple Law Enforcement 101.
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Thomas Pynchon _ Vineland
Sure, she knew folks who had no problem at all with the past. A lot of it they just didn't remember. Many told her, one way and another, that it was enough for them to get by in real time without diverting precious energy to what, face it, was fifteen or twenty years dead and gone. But for Frenesi the past was one her case forever, the zombie at her back, the enemy no one wanted to see, a mouth wide and dark as the grave."
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