G

“This person greeted the Cohen by raising his left hand, then spreading the fingers two and two away from the thumb so as to form the Hebrew letter shin, signifying the initial letter of one of the pre-Mosaic (that is, plural) names of God, which may never be spoken. “Basically wishing long life and prosperity,” explained the Cohen, answering with the same gesture.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

“There is a character in The Count of Monte Cristo who digs through solid rock for years and finally gets somewhere: he finds himself in another cell. It was that kind of moment.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“All of which is to say, the way we make sense of things is rarely to engage the things. We don’t confront the things before us as something different; we confront them as something we already know, as if everything fits into pre-ordained buckets of knowledge, as if those buckets weren’t themselves created, as if buckets and categories themselves weren’t buckets or categories that might impede knowing.”
― Daniel Coffeen, Reading the Way of Things: Towards a New Technology of Making Sense

“Of course, Newt knew that Lorena was a whore. It was an awkward fact, but it didn’t lessen his feelings for her one whit. She had been abandoned in Lonesome Dove by a gambler who decided she was bad for his luck; she lived over the Dry Bean and was known to receive visitors of various descriptions, but Newt was not a young man to choke on such details. He was not absolutely sure what whores did, but he assumed that Lorena had come by her profession as accidentally as he had come by his. It was pure accident that he happened to be a horse wrangler for the Hat Creek outfit, and no doubt an equally pure one that had made Lorena a whore.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove