It was one of those great iron afternoons in London: the yellow sun being teased apart by a thoasand chimneys breathing, fawning upward without shame. This smoke is more than the day’s breath, more th...
It might be useful, she reminds herself, not to panic here. She imagines herself solidifying into not exactly a pillar of salt, something between that and a commemorative statue, iron and gaunt, of al...
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.
It is an ajtys—a singing-duel. The boy and girl stand in the eye of the village carrying on a mocking well-I-sort-of-like-you-even-if-there’s-one-or-two-weird-things-about-you-for-instance—kind of gam...
It had been dark at the beach for hours, he hadn't been smoking much and it wasn't headlights – but before she turned away, he could swear he saw light falling on her face, the orange light just after...
Is the Tube human? Semihuman? Well, uh, how human's that, so forth. Are TV sets brought alive by broadcast signals, like the clay bodies of men and women animated by the spirit of God's love?
Is it just this miserable fucking city, too many faces, making us crazy? Are we seeing some wholesale return of the dead?You’d prefer retail?
I mean only that in our Times, 'tis not a rare Dispute, Maskelyne assures him. Reason, or any Vocation to it,-- the Pursuit of the Sciences,-- these are the hope of the Young, the new Music their Fami...
I haven’t sold my soul yet – well, maybe a couple bars of rhythm and blues here and there.
I have look'd on Worlds far distant, their Beauty how pitiless.
I had my Boswell, once, Mason tells Boswell, Dixon and I. We had a joint Boswell. Preacher nam’d Cherrycoke. Scribbling ev’rything down, just like you, Sir. Have you, twirling his Hand in Ellipses,— y...
I dreamt of a City to the West of here, Dixon tries to recall, scrying in his Coffee-Mug, the wind blowing Wood-smoke in his eyes, at some great Confluence of Rivers, or upon a Harbor in some inland S...
I dream that I have found us both again,With spring so many strangers' lives away,And we, so free,Out walking by the sea,With someone else's paper words to say....They took us at the gates of green re...
I am the twentieth century. I am the ragtime and the tango; sans-serif, clean geometry. I am the virgin's-hair whip and the cunningly detailed shackles of decadent passion. I am every lonely railway s...
I am having a hallucination now, I don't need drugs for that.
How do you feel about this terrible thing?Terrible, said Oedipa.Wonderful!
Here was world of simplicity and certainty no acidhead, no revolutionary anarchist would ever find, a world based on the one and zero of life and death. Minimal, beautiful. The patterns of life and de...
Hair and drug-use issues notwithstanding, I've never thought of you as any less than professional.
Every mode of violent death available to Renaissance man, including a lye pit, land mines, a trained falcon with envenom'd talons, is employed. It plays, as Metzger remarked later, like a Road Runner...
Doc remembered how Polaroids have no negatives and the life of the prints is limited. These, he noticed, were already beginning to shift color and fade.