Shit, money, and the World, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country’s fate. But they did not prosper… about all they did was persist
Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.
As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.
Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.
It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.
But as we all know, rock ‘n’ roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever.
It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus.
They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.
All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.
Let the peace of this day be here tomorrow when I wake up.
Beneath the rubato of the day abided a stern pulse beating on, ineluctable, unforgiving, whereby whatever was evaded or put off now had to be made up for later, and at a higher level of intensity.
The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator.
There are places we fear, places we dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, sometimes, too late.
Can’t say it often enough – change your hair, change your life.
The silences here are retreats of sound, like the retreat of the surf before a tidal wave: sound draining away, down slopes of acoustic passage, to gather, someplace else, to a great surge of noise.
One glance at any government budget anywhere in the world tells the story—the money is always in place, already allocated, the motive everywhere is fear, the more immediate the fear, the higher the multiples.
You’re chicken, she told herself, snapping her seat belt. This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl.
The grandeur of space, dig it. Zillions of stars, each one gets its own pixel.”“Awesome.”“Maybe, but it’s code’s all it is.
I don’t do lunch. Corrupt artifact of late capitalism. Breakfast maybe?
The innocent are guilty, the guilty are beyond hope, everything’s on its head, it’s a Twelfth Night of late-capitalist contradiction…
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?
There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not.
He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
Look at it, every day more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothin but portals to Web sites for what Management wants everybody addicted to, shopping games, jerking off, streaming endless garbage-
The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
Only the framing material,” Lucas demurely, “obvious influences, Neo-Tokyo from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metal Gear Solid by Hideo Kojima, or as he’s known in my crib, God.
Meantime the Newspaper of Record goes around in a little pleated skirt shaking pompoms, leaping in the air with an idiot grin if so much as a cement mixer passes by.
These times are unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one
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?