Quotes from book

Gravity's Rainbow

“There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.”

“There is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.”

“What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?”

“Let the peace of this day be here tomorrow when I wake up.”

“Danger's over, Banana Breakfast is saved.”

“It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.”

“If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”

“There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.”

“You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.”

“All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.”

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

“Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.”

“The object of life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that, however it finds you, it finds you under very weird circumstances.”

“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”

“I want to break out — to leave this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered inseparable, into the radiance of what we would become….”

“Tibet is a special case. Tibet was deliberately set aside by the Empire as free and neutral territory, a Switzerland for the spirit where there is no extradition, and Alp-Himalayas to draw the soul upward, and danger rare enough to tolerate.”

“A million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it.”

“Who has sent this new serpent into our ruinous garden, already too fouled, too crowded to qualify as any locus of innocence — unless innocence be our age's neutral, our silent passing into the machineries of indifference — something that Kekulé's Serpent had come to — not to destroy, but to define to us the loss of… we had been given certain molecules, certain combinations and not others… we used what we found in Nature, unquestioning, shamefully perhaps — but the Serpent whispered, 'They can be changed, and new molecules assembled from the debris of the given…. ' Can anyone tell me what else he whispered to us? Come — who knows?”

“Flotsam from his childhood are rising through his attention. He's remembering the skin of an apple, bursting with nebulae, a look into curved reddening space.”