# Quote — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

> 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. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ‘n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled “black” by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey bars.

- Author: [Thomas Pynchon](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-pynchon.md)
- Book: [Gravity's Rainbow](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-pynchon/gravitys-rainbow.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gravity's_Rainbow#Quotes) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-pynchon/gravitys-rainbow/dont-forget-the

## More from this book

> "The edge of evening … the long curve of people all wishing on the first star.... Always remember those men and women along the thousands of miles of land and sea. The true moment of shadow is the moment in which you see the point of light in the sky. The single point, and the Shadow that has just gathered you in its sweep ..."
>
> Always remember.
>
> The first star hangs between his feet.
>
> Now —

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-pynchon/gravitys-rainbow/the-edge-of-evening.md)

> It's a giant factory-state here, a City of the Future full of extrapolated 1930's swoop-facaded and balconied skyscrapers, lean chrome caryatids with bobbed hairdos, classy airships of all descriptions drifting in the boom and hush of the city abysses, golden lovelies sunning in roof gardens and turning to wave as you pass.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-pynchon/gravitys-rainbow/its-a-giant.md)

> "You." A finger the size of a corncob, an inch from Slothrop's nose.
>
> ...
>
> "Look," Slothrop's friend producing a kraft-paper envelope that even in the gloom Slothrop can tell is fat with American Army yellow-seal scrip, "I want you to hold this for me, till I ask for it back. It looks like Italo is going to get here before Tamara, and I'm not sure which one"
>
> "At this rate, Tamara's gonna get here before tonight," Slothrop interjects in a Groucho Marx voice.
>
> "Don't try to undermine my confidence in you," advises the Large One. "You're the man."

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-pynchon/gravitys-rainbow/you-a-finger.md)