read old agonies inside poor Dumpster, whod tried suicide last semeste — Gravity's Rainbow

"Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ‘n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled “black” by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey bars."

"The odors of shit, death, sweat, sickness, mildew, piss, the breathing of Dora, wrapped him as he crept in staring at the naked corpses being carried out now that America was so close, to be stacked in front of the crematoriums, the men’s penises hanging, their toes clustering white and round as pearls... each face so perfect, so individual, the lips stretched back into death-grins, a whole silent audience caught at the punch line of the joke... and the living, stacked ten to a straw mattress, the weakly crying, coughing, losers... All his vacuums, his labyrinths, had been on the other side of this. While he lived, and drew marks on paper, this invisible kingdom had crept on, in the darkness outside... all this time.... Pokler vomited. He cried some. The walls did not dissolve -- no prison wall ever did, not from tears, not at this finding, on every pallet, in every cell, that the faces are ones he knows after all, and holds dear as himself, and cannot, then, let them return to that silence..."

"No, as none of these, but instead a point in space, a point hung precise as the point where burning must end, never launched, never to fall. And what is the specific shape whose center of gravity is the Brennschluss Point? Dont jump at an infinite number of possible shapes. Theres only one. It is most likely an interface between one order of things and another. Theres a Brennschluss point for every firing site. They still hang up there, all of them, a constellation waiting to have a 13th sign of the Zodiac named for it..."

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

"They are in Love. Fuck the War."

"In the static space of the architect, he mightve used a double integral now and then, early in his career, to find volumes under surfaces whose equations are known — masses, moments, centers of gravity. But it has been years since hes had to do with anything that basic...in the dynamic space of the living Rocket, the double integral has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled....Meters per second will integrate to meters. The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It will never fall."