The Crying of Lot 49

3 uses

Oedipa found herself after five minutes sucked utterly into the landscape of evil Richard Wharfinger had fashioned for his 17th-century audiences, so preapocalyptic, death-wishful, sensually fatigued, unprepared, a little poignantly, for that abyss of civil war that had been waiting, cold and deep, only a few years ahead of them.†

1 use

I slept three hours a night trying not to dream, and spent the other 21 at the forcible acquisition of faith.†

1 use

Something they all heard with an extra sense atrophied in herself.†

1 use

Becoming conscious of the hard, strung presence she stood on—knowing as if maps had been flashed for her on the sky how these tracks ran on into others, others, knowing they laced, deepened, authenticated the great night around her.†

1 use

Though he had never talked business with her, she had known it to be a fraction of him that couldn't come out even, would carry forever beyond any decimal place she might name; her love, such as it had been, remaining incommensurate with his need to possess, to alter the land, to bring new skylines, personal antagonisms, growth rates into being.†

3 uses

Oedipa looked and saw Baby Igor, disguised as a Turkish beggar lad, skulking with the dog around a set she took to be Constantinople.†

3 uses

If you believe an excerpt from the Bogatir's or Gaidamak's log. forwarded in April to the General-Adjutant in St. Petersburg and now somewhere in the Krasnyi Arkhiv, it was the Disgruntled that had vanished during the night.†

3 uses

So much of him already had dissipated.†

1 use

All except for Dr. Blobb and his servant, who had dissociated themselves from the hassle at the very outset, proclaimed in loud voices that they were British subjects, and even from time to time "ventured to sing certain of the more improving of our Church hymns."†

1 use

Ercole binds his hands and feet with scarlet silk cords, lets him know who it is he's run afoul of reaches into the box with a pair of pincers, tears out Domenico's tongue, stabs him a couple times, pours into the box a beaker of aqua regia, enumerates a list of other goodies, including castration, that Domenico will undergo before he's allowed to die, all amid screams, tongueless attempts to pray, agonized struggles from the victim.†

1 use

"A cash nexus," brooded Oedipa, "you and Perry Mason, two of a kind, it's all you know about, you shysters."†

1 use

Power, omniscience, implacable malice, attributes of what they'd thought to be a historical principle, a Zeitgeist, are carried over to the now human enemy.†

2 uses

Leery of strong Protestant leanings in the Bohemian branch of the family, the Emperor, Rudolph II, had for a time withdrawn his patronage.†

1 use

But the endless rituals of trade-in, week after week, never got as far as violence or blood, and so were too plausible for the impressionable Mucho to take for long.†

3 uses

"How poignant," Oedipa said.†

1 use

At some indefinite passage in night's sonorous score, it also came to her that she would be safe. that something, perhaps only her linearly fading drunkenness, would protect her.†

3 uses

And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn, Oedipa remembered.†

2 uses

She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth: and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit.†

3 uses

Back to Squamuglia, where Vittorio, the Duke's courier, reports how Niccolo has been talking treason.†

3 uses

The penciled note in the paperback had mentioned a variant.†