Preterite Quotes

1. "The Pig Chef was - if you thought about it - one of the more sinister icons of American roadside art. Danny's personal totem. What kind of pig is a butcher? What kind of pig cooks barbeque? A traitor pig, a killer pig, a doomed preterite pig destined for eternal damnation. Danny's Pig Chefs showed the full weight of this knowledge in their mocking eyes and snaggled snouts."
Author: Rudy Rucker

2. "There is a Hand to turn the time,Though thy Glass today be run,Till the Light hath brought the Towers lowFind the last poor Preterite one . . .Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road,All through our crippl'd Zone,With a face in ev'ry MountainsideAnd a Soul in ev'ry stoneNow Everybody -"
Author: Thomas Pynchon

3. "Nobody wanted to hear about all the Preterite, the many God passes over when he chooses a few for salvation. William argued holiness for these "second Sheep," without whom there'd be no elect. You can bet the Elect in Boston were pissed off about that. And it got worse. William felt that what Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot was for the Preterite. Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart. How can Jesus be an exception? could we feel for him anything but horror in the face of the unnatural, the extracreational? Well, if he is the son of man, and if what we feel is not horror but love, then we have to love Judas too. Right? How William avoided being burned for heresy, nobody knows."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

4. "That's what Jesus meant," whispers the ghost of Slothrop's first American ancestor William, "venturing out on the Sea of Galilee. He saw it from the lemming point of view. Without the millions who had plunged and drowned, there could have been no miracle. The successful loner was only the other part of it: the last piece to the jigsaw puzzle, whose shape had already been created by the Preterite, like the last blank space on the table.""Wait a minute. You people didn't have jigsaw puzzles.""Aw, shit."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

Preterite Quotes Pictures