# Quote — Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

> She might have found the Tristero anywhere in her Republic, through any of a hundred lightly-concealed entranceways, a hundred alienations, if only she'd looked. She stopped for a minute between the steel rails, raising her head as if to sniff the air. Becoming conscious of the hard, strung presence she stood on — knowing as if maps had been flashed for her on the sky how these tracks ran on into others, others, knowing they laced, deepened, authenticated the great night around her. If only she'd looked. … She remembered drifters she had listened to, Americans speaking their language carefully, scholarly, as if they were in exile from somewhere else invisible yet congruent with the land she lived in; and walkers along the roads at night, zooming in and out of your headlights without looking up, too far from any town to have a real destination. And the voices before and after the dead man's that had phoned at random during the darkest slowest hours, searching ceaseless among the dial's ten million possibilities for that magical Other who would reveal herself out of the roar of relays monotone litanies of insult, filth, fantasy love, whose brute repetition must someday call into being the trigger of the unnamable act, the recognition, the Word.

- 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-might-have

## 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)