# Quote — Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

> She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.

- Author: [Thomas Pynchon](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-pynchon.md)
- Book: [The Crying of Lot 49](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-pynchon/the-crying-of-lot-49.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Pynchon#The_Crying_of_Lot_49_(1966)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-pynchon/the-crying-of-lot-49/she-looked-down

## More from this book

> Teamwork," Koteks snarled, "is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It's a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-pynchon/the-crying-of-lot-49/teamwork-koteks-snarled.md)

> You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there’s cataclysm.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-pynchon/the-crying-of-lot-49/you-know-what.md)

> "Whenever I put the headsets on now," he'd continued, "I really do understand what I find there. When those kids sing about 'She loves you,' yeah, well, you know, she does, she's any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, shapes, sizes, distances from death, but she loves. And the 'you' is everybody. And herself."

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thomas-pynchon/the-crying-of-lot-49/whenever-i-put.md)