Mitchell McGill

“Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it’s impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which comes to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroys any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the ’30s, the curious fashions of the ’20s, the peculiar moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see. I”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“Profane had got into this way of thinking, and along with parties in the daytime and a rotating shift system devised by Bung the foreman whereby you didn’t know till the day before which hours you would be working the next, it put him on a weird calendar which was not ruled off into neat squares at all but more a mosaic of tilted street-surfaces that changed position according to sunlight, streetlight, moonlight, nightlight…

He wasn’t comfortable in this street. The people mobbing the pavement between the stalls seemed no more logical than the objects in his dream. “They don’t have faces,” he said to Angel.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“After that long of more named pavements than he’d care to count, Profane had grown a little leery of streets, especially streets like this. They had in fact all fused into a single abstracted Street, which come the full moon he would have nightmares about.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“The object of life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that, however it finds you, it finds you under very weird circumstances.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow