Gravity's Rainbow

But like Lord Acton always sez, History is not woven by innocent hands.

The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image.

Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day's end.

"Oh sooper dooper," she says, "think I'm catching a cold."
You're catching the War. It's infecting you and I don't know how to keep it away. Oh, Jess. Jessica. Don't leave me. ...

Well, it's a matter of continuity. Most people's lives have ups and downs that are relatively gradual, a sinuous curve with first derivatives at every point. They're the ones who never get struck by lightning. No real idea of cataclysm at all. But the ones who do get hit experience a singular point, a discontinuity in the curve of life—do you know what the time rate of change is at a cusp? Infinity, that's what! A-and right across the point, it's minus infinity! How's that for sudden change, eh?

So when he disentangles himself, it is extravagantly. He creates a bureaucracy of departure, inoculations against forgetting, exit visas stamped with love-bites . . . but coming back is something he's already forgotten about.

"Do you have a photo of him?" the old woman handing her a tin army plate with the remains of her morning's Bauernfrüh-stuck. "I can give you a spell."
"Sometimes I can call up his face in a cup of tea. But the herbs have to be gathered carefully. I'm not that good at it yet."
"But you're in love. Technique is just a substitute for when you get older."
"Why not stay in love always?"

Tchitcherine: "You mean thio-phosphate, don't you?" Thinks indicating the presence of sulfur. . . . Wimpe: "I mean ífoophosphate, Vaslav," indicating the Presence of God.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek.

Are those people real, or what?
A. Some are real, and some aren't.
Q. Well are the real ones necessary? or unnecessary?
A. It depends what you have in mind.
Q. Shit, I don't have anything in mind.
A. We do.

"Your employer."
"It's not fair," Pirate moans, "I haven't even done me morning pushups yet."

Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.

—wernher von braun

В этой последней Войне смерть была не врагом, но коллаборационистом.

About the paranoia often noted under the drug, there is nothing remarkable. Like other sorts of paranoia, it is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination—not yet blind-ingly One, but at least connected, and perhaps a route In for those like Tchitcherine who are held at the edge. ...

"This is some kind of a plot, right?" Slothrop sucking saliva from velvet pile.
"Everything is some kind of a plot, man," Bodine laughing.

"Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "At" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now—what you're doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment. . . .