My favourite passages from V by Thomas Pynchon

“I am the twentieth century. I am the ragtime and the tango; sans-serif, clean geometry. I am the virgin's-hair whip and the cunningly detailed shackles of decadent passion. I am every lonely railway station in every capital of Europe. I am the Street, the fanciless buildings of government. the cafe-dansant, the clockwork figure, the jazz saxophone, the tourist-lady's hairpiece, the fairy's rubber breasts, the travelling clock which always tells the wrong time and chimes in different keys. I am the dead palm tree, the Negro's dancing pumps, the dried fountain after tourist season. I am all the appurtenances of night.”

• Poem by Brenda Wigglesworth, the American traveller whom Benny Profane meets in Malta
  

“Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.”

• McClintic Sphere, the saxophonist
  

“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.”

• A summary of the lost soul Benny Profane
  

“Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no "moments of truth." It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which thenselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one's own unanswered.”

• Fausto Maijstral loses his faith in God as he sees the city around him (Valetta, Malta) blown to pieces, day by day