luca

“The lack of engagement from the no longer tangible participant, I noted, was vast and spreading. Sex and novels and music and movies were the things that made life bearable - not friends, not family, not school, not social scenes, not interactions - and that was the summer when I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark every other week but barely had dinner with my separated parents even twice.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, The Shards

“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.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“It’s true,” Vanya now, “look at the forms of capitalist expression. Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of killing, and pornographies of deduction—ahh, that sigh when we guess the murderer—all these novels, these films and songs they lull us with, they’re approaches, more comfortable and less so, to that Absolute Comfort.” A pause to allow Rudi a quick and sour grin. “The self-induced orgasm.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow