“The Line makes itself felt,– thro’ some Energy unknown, ever are we haunted by that Edge so precise, so near. In the Dark, one never knows. Of course I am seeking the Warrior Path, imagining myself as heroick Scout. We all feel it Looming, even when we’re awake, out there ahead someplace, the way you come to feel a River or Creek ahead, before anything else,– sound, sky, vegetation,– may have announced it. Perhaps ’tis the very deep sub-audible Hum of its Traffic that we feel with an equally undiscover’d part of the Sensorium,– does it lie but over the next Ridge? the one after that? We have mileage Estimates from Rangers and Runners, yet for as long as its Distance from the Post Mark’d West remains unmeasur’d, nor is yet recorded as Fact, may it remain, a-shimmer, among the few final Pages of its Life as Fiction.”
– Thomas Pynchon, Mason and Dixon

“Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself.”
– Thomas Pynchon, V.

“Life’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.”
– Thomas Pynchon, V.

“Earth, withal, is a Body, like our own, with its network of Points, dispos’d along its Meridians, – much as our medicine in China has identified, upon the Human body, a like set of Lines invisible, upon which, bead wise, are strung Points, where the Flow of Chee may be beneficially strengthen’d by insertions of Gold Needles.”
– Thomas Pynchon, Mason and Dixon