Цитаты из книги Лот 49

Things grew less and less clear. At some point she went into the bathroom, tried to find her image in the mirror and couldn't. She had a moment of nearly pure terror. Then remembered that the mirror had broken and fallen in sink. "Seven years' bad luck," she said aloud.

Oedipa resolved to pull in at the next motel she saw, however ugly, stillness and four walls having at some point become preferable to this illusion of speed, freedom, wind in your hair, unreeling landscape—it wasn't. What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain.

She didn't leave. Not that the shrink held any dark power over her. But it was easier to stay. Who'd know the day she was cured? Not him, he'd admitted that himself.

The man was a refugee Hungarian pastry cook talking shop, but there was your Mucho: thin-skinned.

– Знаете, что такое чудо? Это не то, о чем говорил Бакунин. Это проникновение иного мира в нашу реальность.

Храните свою фантазию, дорогая моя, чем бы она ни была, ибо ее утрата низведет вас до уровня всех прочих. Вы потеряете индивидуальность.

Вероятно, в тот день была получка, поскольку в баре все были уже пьяны.

Those, now that she was looking at them, she saw to be the alternatives. Those symmetrical four. She didn't like any of them, but hoped she was mentally ill; that that's all it was.

Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a ' letter, another lover.

"I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy." "Cherish it!" cried Hilarius, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be."

There is me, there are the others. You know, with the LSD, we're finding, the distinction begins to vanish. Egos lose their sharp edges. But I never took the drug, I chose to remain in relative paranoia, where at least I know who I am and who the others are.

"And part of me must have really wanted to believe —like a child hearing, in perfect safety, a tale of horror —that the unconscious would be like any other room, once the light was let in. That the dark shapes would resolve only into toy horses and Biedermeyer furniture. That therapy could tame it after all, bring it into society with no fear of its someday reverting. I wanted to believe, despite everything my life had been. Can you imagine?"

She did gather that there were two distinct kinds of this entropy. One having to do with heat-engines, the other to do with communication. The equation for one, back in the '3o's, had looked very like the equation for the other. It was a coincidence. ... "Entropy is a figure of speech, then," sighed Nefastis, "a metaphor. It connects the world of thermo-dynamics to the world of information flow.

...; a whitewashed bust of Jay Gould that Pierce kept over the bed on a shelf so narrow for it she'd always had the hovering fear it would someday topple on them. Was that how he'd died, she wondered, among dreams, crushed by the only ikon in the house? That only made her laugh, out loud and helpless: You're so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew.

Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work.

<...> Коллекция марок - тысячи маленьких разноцветных окон, уводящих в глубины пространства и времени.

– Может, сегодня расскажут что-нибудь про Китай. Мне нравится заниматься этим, когда говорят про Вьетнам, но под Китай дело идет лучше всего. Мы думаем обо всех этих китайцах. Кишащих, размножающихся. Вот оно, изобилие жизни. Так ведь сексуальнее, правда?

Пожалуй, следовало бы ощутить классическую ярость отвергнутой девы, но у неё было полно других забот.