Vineland Quotes
"In his dream these had been carrier pigeons from someplace far across the ocean, landing and taking off again one by one, each bearing a message for him."
"Somewhere down the hill hammers and saws were busy and country music was playing out of somebody's truck radio."
"With enough Nestle's Quik on top, they weren't all that bad."
"Just dig yourself," shaking his head at the chocolate crumbs on the dog's face.
"This year it snuck up on me, hate to think I'm gettin' too old for this."
"Calvin doesn't cut nothin' bigger than a 14," a girl younger than his daughter screamed at him out her window.
"But underneath, we're still just country fellas."
"Played together in the old Six Rivers Conference," Buster all smiles.
"You and me Zoyd, we're like Bigfoot. Times go on, we never change."
"Don't be disingenuous, I know you still believe in all that shit."
"Who was saved?" That's all, really easy, "Who was saved?"
"He kept coming back, each time with a new and more demented plan."
"Our dream, Ernie's and mine, is to locate a legendary observer-participant from those times."
"Risking a lifelong career in law enforcement, in the service of the ever-dwindling attention span of an ever more in-fantilized population. A sorry spectacle."
"I got a contract!" Hector was screaming as they loaded him into the Tubaldetox paddy wagon.
"Will you stay over with me tonight? Can Isaiah come get you in the morning?"
"You're Tubed out worse 'n Hector if you think your mom and me'll ever get back together."
"Maybe what you really want's just to get out of the house."
"Keep 'em legs together," he replied, "teen bimbo."
"We are digits in God's computer, And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees."
"You'll never know enough about your body to take responsibility for it, so better just hand it over to those who are qualified."
"I had been spending years and years of my life with these fantasies of taking revenge on Brock Vond."
"He loved Frenesi but did not possess her, and was driven to fetishism in faraway countries as his only outlet, helpless to change."
"I have to trust the way this makes me feel. Feels right, DL. Like we're really going to change the world this time."
"The discipline had steered her early enough away from the powerlessness and the sooner or later self-poisoning hatred that had been waiting for her."
"Only when she was away from them, learning to fight, did she feel any good."
"Everybody thought he'd drunk himself to death — Instead he'd gone off to Tibet — to save his soul!"
"The everyday pieces were pirate ships of the stratosphere and Himalayas held for ransom."
"DL, once in his arms, found, surprised, that she could now think about her situation clearly for the first time since the Pizza Hut."
"It's going to take a while," he chuckled aloud, "to get to the bottom of this!"
"When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face."
"Never, because too many of us are learning how to pay attention."
"But to see injustices happening and ignore them, that's more 'dangerous' in the long run, isn't it?"
"California's only reality for them was to be found in the million ways it failed to be New York."
"We are not the ones who have to encapsulate ourselves inside our cars all the time."
"A camera is a gun. An image taken is a death performed."
"We will be architects of a just Hell for the fascist pig."
"As time goes by, the person behind the camera becomes the story."
"It's all coming apart. Suddenly everybody's got a payoff story to tell, total paranoia."
"When these little left-wing kiddie games come apart, things often turn dangerous."
"Men had it so simple. When it wasn't about Sticking It In, it was about Having The Gun, a variation that allowed them to Stick It In from a distance."
"The details of how and when, day by working day, made up their real world."
"Who couldn't use some simplification, what brought seekers into deserts, fishermen to streams, men to war, a seductive promise."
"She would have hated to admit how much of this came down to Brock's penis, straightforwardly erect, just to pick a random example."
"Her impulse was to deny his simple formula, to imagine that with the gun in the house, the 24-frame-per-second truth she still believed in would find some new, more intense level of truth."
"The grand jury already knew her story. The testimony took days but was all pro forma."
"She woke in bedsheets smelling of vinegar, motel sheets at very first morning light, cold seeping through the inches of space beneath the metal door."
"More and more .. . unstable. By then, all he wanted was out — but he felt he was trapped."
"He thought he was being coerced. He kept saying that they were 'forcing' him."
"Nobody attempted to trace the path of the gun. It was almost a supernatural term in the story."
"The last words DL was to hear from her friend for a while. Frenesi hung up and ran in to find Jinx moving the kids briskly out the door."
"The camera moved in on his face. 'Howie found the zoom,' Ditzah commented."
"With the black rearing silhouette of the Nixon Monument against the sunset, bullhorns with failing batteries quacking invisibly."
"She followed the fence till she saw lights, the bleary all-night cyan blue flooding over everything."
"It was a dim tunnel that went for hundreds of miles, conceived in the early sixties as a disposable freeway that would only be used, to full capacity, once."
"DL by then was so crazy that half the time she didn't know who was there and who wasn't."
"The landscape out the windows seesawing violently around."
"In the building's penumbra, not even breathing hard, so elegantly that you couldn't say jimmied, she more like Jamesed the side door lock."
"Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it."
"Iron speakers up on stripped fir poles crashed alive with the national anthem."
"He was terrified. He glimpsed his brain about to turn inside out like a sock but not what would happen after that."
"As the weeks rolled along like less than perfect waves and the weekly tear-off options went crumpling one by one."
"The baby went along on its own program, robbing her of milk and sleep, acknowledging her only as a host."
"One 3:00 A.M., in front of the Lobster Trick Movie, Sasha rocking the baby, Frenesi in a slow tuned throb, breasts in torment, bathing in Tubelight, whispered, 'You'd better keep her out of my way, Mom. . . .'"
"Her blue eyes, with this precise placement of room lamps, gathering most of the light, eyes so long loved, glaring now, savage with a fore-glimpse of some rush into fate, something shadowless and ultimate."
"Now Time had claimed her again, put her under house arrest, taken her passport away."
"One of those evenings when everything felt in harmony, at ease."
"I thought I was doing what was necessary for my wife and my baby, freedom didn't come into it the way it did for Sasha."
"The struggle between the IATSE, a creature of organized crime in collusion with the studios, and Herb Sorrell's Conference of Studio Unions, unapologetically liberal, progressive, New Deal, socialist, and thus, in the toxic political situation, 'Communist,' had been going on all through the war but now broke into the open in a series of violent strike actions against the studios."
"But Hub, stubborn, not yet grown out of his wartime patriotism, stuck with the losers till the end."
"Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam."
"Take care of your dead, or they'll take care of you."
"Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil."
"Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato."
"The light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the same bright-colored shadows."
"All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar."
"Wheresoever the CIA putteth in its meathooks upon the world, there also are to be found those substances which God may have created but the U.S. Code hath decided to control."
"For ten years no one in the world died, because there was no boat to take them across."