Date: 1985

"In the dark the mind runs on like a devouring machine, the only thing awake in the universe."

— Delillo, Don (b. 1936)

Date: 1994

"Because you are traveling right along with him as he forms his sentences, making each word he says appear as a little clump of letters on your screen, you begin to feel as if you are doing the thinking yourself; you occupy some dark space in the interior of his mind as he goes about his job."

— Baker, Nicholson (b. 1957)

Date: 1997

"She occupies now an entirely new angular relation to Mercy, to those refusals, among the Living, to act on behalf of Death or its ev'ryday Coercions,--Wages too low to live upon, Laws written by Owners, Infantry, Bailiffs, Prison, Death's thousand Metaphors in the World,--as if, the instant of h...

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 1997

"Mason had more than once caught the old Astronomer watching Susannah with a focus'd Patience he recogniz'd from the Sector Room...as if waiting for a sudden shift in the sky of Passion, like that headlong change in Star Position that had led him to the discovery of the Aberration of Light,-- wai...

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 1997

"The Loaf, the indispensible point of convergence upon every British table, the solid British Quartern Loaf, is like the Soul, Emptiness."

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 1997

"Forgive me, Friend, I've again presum'd our Minds running before the same Wind."

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 1997

"Is it something in this Wilderness, something ancient, that waited for them, and infected their Souls when they came?"

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 1997

"But her innocent attention has reach'd unto the dead Vacuum ever at the bottom of my soul,-- humiliation absolute."

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 1997

"What caretaker, what Verger of the Temple of the Self...?"

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 1997

"Nor might any left behind on the ground see her again,-- would they?-- passing above in the Sky, the sleeves of her garment now catching light like wings...her mind no more than that of a Kite, the Wind blowing through..."

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)