If there is any

“If there is any political moral to be found in this world,” Stencil once wrote in his journal, “it is that we carry on the business of this century with an intolerable double vision. Right and Left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouse of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets by mainpulated mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future.

What of the real present, the men-of-no-politics, the once-respectable Golden Mean? Obsolete; in any case, lost sight of. In a West of such extremes we can expect, at the very least, a highly alienated populace within not many years.”

-Thomas Pynchon, in the novel V (p. 441, Bantam Windstone paperback edition, 1963)

If he’d been the type

If he’d been the type who evolves theories of political history for his own amusement, he might have said all political events: wars, governments and uprisings, have the desire to get laid as their roots; because history unfolds according to economic forces and the only reason anybody wants to get rich is so he can get laid steadily, with whomever he chooses.

-Thomas Pynchon, in the novel V (p. 198, Bantam Windstone paperback edition, 1963)