Цитаты из книги Gravity’s Rainbow

Like signals set out for lost travelers, shapes keep repeating for him, Zonal shapes he will allow to enter but won't interpret, not any more.

The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.

You are either alone absolutely, alone with your own death, or you take part in the larger enterprise, and you share in the deaths of others.

... So he hunted, as a servo valve with a noisy input will, across the Zero, between the two desires, personal identity and impersonal salvation.

What does irony sound like in Russian?

But this is all the impersonation of life. The real movement is not from death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured. The best you can do is to polymerize a few dead molecules. But polymerizing is not resurrection.

The chalk cliffs rear up above, cold and serene as death. Early barbarians of Europe who ventured close enough to this coast saw these white barriers through the mist, and knew then where their dead had been taken to.

"They pray not only for their daily bread," Strese-mann had said, "but also for their daily illusion."

So that the right material may find its way to the right dreamer, everyone, everything involved must be exactly in place in the pattern. It was nice of Jung to give us the idea of an ancestral pool in which everybody shares the same dream material. But how is it we are each visited as individuals, each by exactly and only what he needs?

First blood, first sacrifice. Kurt Mondaugen took it as a sign. One of these German mystics who grew up reading Hesse, Stefan George, and Richard Wilhelm, ready to accept Hitler on the basis of Demian-metaphysics, he seemed to look at fuel and oxidizer as paired opposites, male and female principles uniting in the mystical egg of the combustion chamber: creation and destruction, fire and water, chemical plus and chemical minus—

One night he set fire to twenty pages of calculations. Integral signs weaved like charmed cobras, comical curly ds marched along like hunchbacks through the fire-edge into billows of lace ash. But that was his only relapse.

It took the Dreyfus Affair to get the Zionists out and doing, finally: what will drive you out of your soup-kettle? Has it already happened? Was it tonight's attack and deliverance? Will you go to the Heath, and begin your settlement, and wait there for your Director to come?

For this crew, nostalgia is like seasickness: only the hope of dying from it is keeping them alive.

Are you really this evil, or is it just an act?

There is nearly complete parallelism between analgesia and addiction. The more pain it takes away, the more we desire it. It appears we can't have one property without the other, any more than a particle physicist can specify position without suffering an uncertainty as to the particle's velocity—

Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

"Why are you burning my doll's hair?" "Well, it's not her own hair, you know." "Father said it belonged to a Russian Jewess."

Who could have guessed there'd be real black rocket troops? That a story made up to scare last year's enemy should prove to be literally true—and no way now to stuff them back in the bottle or even say the spell backward: no one ever knew the complete spell—different people knew different parts of it, that's what teamwork is. . . .

"Yeah well," as film critic Mitchell Prettyplace puts it in his definitive 18-volume study of King Kong, "you know, he did love her, folks."