18 quotes
What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
A million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it.
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
The knife cuts through the apple like a knife cutting an apple. Everything is where it is, no clearer than usual, but certainly more present. So much has to be left behind now, so quickly.
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
A screaming comes across the sky.
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts.
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Flotsam from his childhood are rising through his attention. He's remembering the skin of an apple, bursting with nebulae, a look into curved reddening space.
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
The man's thirst for guilt was insatiable as the desert's for water.
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
She watches Marvy's face as he pays Monika, watches him in this primal American act, paying, more deeply himself than when coming, or asleep, or maybe even dying.
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Non-Masons stay pretty much in the dark about What Goes On, though now and then something jumps out, exposes itself, jumps giggling back again, leaving you with few details but a lot of Awful Suspicions.
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Those all must have all been important to me once. What I am now grew from that. A former self is a fool, an insufferable ass, but he's still human, you'd no more turn him out than you'd turn out any kind of cripple, would you?
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
They are in love. Fuck the war.
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Each will have his personal Rocket.
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
It can get pretty fascist in here...
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Tibet is a special case. Tibet was deliberately set aside by the Empire as free and neutral territory, a Switzerland for the spirit where there is no extradition, and Alp-Himalayas to draw the soul upward, and danger rare enough to tolerate.
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
"The true moment of shadow is the moment in which you see the point of light in the sky. The single point, and the Shadow that has just gathered you in its sweep ..."
Always remember.
The first star hangs between his feet.
Now —
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Jamf was only a fiction, to help him explain what he felt so terribly, so immediately in his genitals for those rockets each time exploding in the sky... to help him deny what he could not possibly admit: that he might be in love, in sexual love, with his, and his race’s, death.
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall soon it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)