For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and… - Thomas Pynchon

Hair and drug-use issues notwithstanding, I've never thought of you as any less than professional.

Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.... Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy of America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only wa[y] she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia.

"Mason glowers, shaking his head. "I've ascended, descended, even condescended, and the List's not ended, — but haven't yet trans-cended a blessed thing, thankee.