Maya

“Odd, yes, here in the capital of eternal youth, endless summer and all, that fear should be running the town again as in days of old, like the Hollywood blacklist you don't remember and the Watts rioting you do - it spreads, like blood in a swimming pool, till it occupies all the volume of the day. And then maybe some playful soul shows up with a bucketful of piranhas, dumps them in the pool, and right away they can taste the blood. They swim around looking for what's bleeding, but they don't find anything, all of them getting more and more crazy, till the craziness reaches a point. Which is when they begin to feed on each other.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

“And the eye became a body, the murky heart of a rose. The sinister shadow of an orchid. Or the indolent poppy balanced behind the ear of Baudelaire.”
― Patti Smith, The Coral Sea

“Sometimes in the shadows the view would light up, usually when he was smoking weed, as if the contrast knob of Creation had been messed with just enough to give everything an underglow, a luminous edge, and promise that the night was about to turn epic somehow.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

“ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA.
ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.
USE THEM TOGETHER. USE THEM IN PEACE.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two