"When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it with a transparent surface parallel to your own front that hums and bisects both your ears, making eyes very alert. The light bends toward chalky blue. Your skin aches. At last: something real."

-- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Not because it was ugly but because it showed his terrible flaw so clear: reminding him it was not Moldweorp he hated so much as a perverse idea of what is clean; not the girl he sympathized with so much a her humanity. Fate, it occured to him then, chooses weird agents.-- Thomas Pynchon, Under the Rose