Quote / Citação (15)

"And while of course it behooves a man to break the head of any Mexican kept in blind ignorance who's been shipped in to steal your job," preached the Reverend Moss Gatlin, who, never one to forgo a good fight, had been here since the strike was called, "we must also understand how eminently practical in the long term is Christian forbearance, if by it we may thus further the dumb scab's education, just as your own insulted heads at Cripple and the San Juans once got beaten into them the lesson that a job however obtained is sacred, even a scab's job, for it carries the ironclad obligation to resist from then on the forces of ownership and the mills of evil, with whatever means are available unto you all."

(...)

"I saw the Death Special, Ma." This was a rumored and widely feared armored motorcar, with two colt machine guns on it, mounted fore and aft, that the Naldwin-Felts "detective" agency had come up with for penetrating, controlling, and thinning down the size of ill disposed crowds.

(...)

... one look at these red faces and bulging eyes and he understood that if it should come down to it, he would not be able to save his life, or his mother's or Dunn's, by appealing to anything these grownups might feel for kids, even kids of their own.... Pretending to have a friendly chat with potential targets or their Death Special was a level of evil neither boy had quite suspected in adults till now.

(...)

"With a rifle it's too personal," one of the Guardsmen said, "when you're sighting 'em in one by one, gives you a minute to get to know them 'fore you do your deed, but this 'sucker  time it takes to get your finger off of the trigger it's already fired ten or twenty rounds, so there's no question of careful aiming , you just pick out what they call a zone you want to tear up, even shut your eyes if you want, don't matter, it's all done for you."

(...) 

"Even if they surrounded it, shot out the tires, we could hold out inside till help showed up."

"Or plow a path right through 'em and out the other side," added the other one, "and escape that way."

Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (2006)

Quote / Citação (14)

“So of course we use them,” Scarsdale well into what by now was his customary stem-winder, “we harness and sodomize them, photograph their degradation, send them up onto the high iron and down into mines and sewers and killing floors, we set them beneath inhuman loads, we harvest from them their muscle and eyesight and health, leaving them in our kindness a few miserable years of broken gleanings. Of course we do. Why not? They are good for little else. How likely are they to grow to their full manhood, become educated, engender families, further the culture or the race? We take what we can while we may. Look at them—they carry the mark of their absurd fate in plain sight. Their foolish music is about to stop, and it is they who will be caught out, awkwardly, most of them tone-deaf and never to be fully aware, few if any with the sense to leave the game early and seek refuge before it is too late. Perhaps there will not, even by then, be refuge.

“We will buy it all up,” making the expected arm gesture, “all this country. Money speaks, the land listens, where the Anarchist skulked, where the horse-thief plied his trade, we fishers of Americans will cast our nets of perfect ten-acre mesh, leveled and varmint-proofed, ready to build on. Where alien muckers and jackers went creeping after their miserable communistic dreams, the good lowland townsfolk will come up by the netful into these hills, clean, industrious, Christian, while we, gazing out over their little vacation bungalows, will dwell in top-dollar palazzos befitting our station, which their mortgage money will be paying to build for us. When the scars of these battles have long faded, and the tailings are covered in bunchgrass and wildflowers, and the coming of the snows is no longer the year’s curse but its promise, awaited eagerly for its influx of moneyed seekers after wintertime recreation, when the shining strands of telpherage have subdued every mountainside, and all is festival and wholesome sport and eugenically-chosen stock, who will be left anymore to remember the jabbering Union scum, the frozen corpses whose names, false in any case, have gone forever unrecorded? who will care that once men fought as if an eight-hour day, a few coins more at the end of the week, were everything, were worth the merciless wind beneath the shabby roof, the tears freezing on a woman’s face worn to dark Indian stupor before its time, the whining of children whose maws were never satisfied, whose future, those who survived, was always to toil for us, to fetch and feed and nurse, to ride the far fences of our properties, to stand watch between us and those who would intrude or question?” He might usefully have taken a look at Foley, attentive back in the shadows. But Scarsdale did not seek out the eyes of his old faithful sidekick. He seldom did anymore. “Anarchism will pass, its race will degenerate into silence, but money will beget money, grow like the bluebells in the meadow, spread and brighten and gather force, and bring low all before it. It is simple. It is inevitable. It has begun.”

Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (2006)

Quote / Citação (12)

"His intent toward the child, he would protest, had never been to dishonor but to rescue. Rescue, however, had many names, and the rope up which a maiden climbed to safety might then be used to bind her most cruelly. In that instant he had become, awkwardly, two creatures resident within the same life - one conveyed without qualification into the haunted spaces of desire, the other walled in by work-demands in which desire was never better than annoying and too often debilitating - the two selves sharing thenceforth this miserable psychic leasehold, co-conscious, each at once respectful and contemptuous of the other's imperatives."

Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (2006)

Quote / Citação (9)

"Trying to kill somebody like Vibe," it seemed to Dally, "best take your lesson from the famous attempt fifteen years ago on Henry Clay Frick, the Butcher of Homestead, which is never go for a head shot. Aiming for Frick's head was Brother Berkmann's big mistake, classic Anarchist mistake of assumin that all heads contain brains you see, when in fact there wa'n't nothin inside damned Frick's bean worth wastin a bullet on. People like 'at, you always want to go for the gut. Because of all the fat that's built up there over the years at the expense of poorer folk. Death may not be too immediate - but in the course of probin around in that mountain of lard lookin for the bullet, a doctor, especially one that treats the upper classes, bein more used to liver ailments and ladies' discontents, is sure to produce, through pure incompetence, a painful and lingering death."

Thomas Pynchon, Against The Day (2006)

Quote / Citação (8)

Whoa there now, Detective Basnight. It was routine to have these, what were known in the business as Grumpy Thoughts now and then, and he guessed he'd known socially or worked alongside of more than enough Pinks and finks who'd ended up clocking out before shift's end, and who's to say how far Lew might have taken his own contrition at working as long as he had on the wrong side, for the wrong people - though at least he had tumbled early, almost from the start, to how little he really wanted the rewards his colleagues were in it for, the motorcars, lakefront galas, introductions to desirable women or useful statesmen, in an era where "detective" was universally understood code for anti-Union thug... somewhere else was the bilocational version of himself, the other, Sherlock Holmes type of sleuth, fighting criminal masterminds hardly distinct from the sorts of tycoons who hired "detectives" to rat on Union activities.

Thomas Pynchon, Against The Day (2006)

Quote / Citação (7)

"There's a new Puccini opera," she said. "An American betrays a Japanese woman. Butterfly. He ought to die of shame, but does not - Butterfly does. What are we to make of this? Is it that Japanese do die of shame and dishonour but American don't? Maybe can't ever die of shame because they lack the cultural equipment? As if, somehow, your country is just mechanically destined to move forward regardless of who is in the way or underfoot?

Thomas Pynchon, Against The Day (2006)

Quote / Citação (6)

"Back in '95, Nansen's plan on his final northward journey was eventually, as the total load grew lighter, to kill sled dogs one by one and feed them to the rest. At first, he reported, the other dogs refused to eat dog-flesh, but slowly they came to accept it."

"Suppose it were to happen to us, in the civilized world. If 'another form of life' decided to use humans for similar purposes, and being out on a mission of comparable desperation, as its own resources dwindled, we human beasts would likewise be slaughtered one by one, and those still alive obliged to, in some sense, eat their flesh."

"Oh dear." The General's wife put down her utensils and gazed at her plate.

"Sir, that is disgusting."

"Not literally, then... but we do use one another, often mortally, with the same disablement of feeling, of conscience... each of us knowing that at some point it will be our own turn. Nowhere to run but into a hostile and lifeless waste."

"You refer to present world conditions under capitalism and the Trusts."

"There appears to be little difference. How else could we have come to it?"

"Evolution. Ape evolves to man, well, what's the next step - human to what? Some compound organism, the American Corporation, for instance, in which even the Supreme Court has recognized legal personhood - a new living species, one that can out-perform most anything an individual can do by himself, no matter how smart or powerful he is."

Thomas Pynchon, Against The Day (2006)