Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Don't miss this amazing video about Gravity's Rainbow winning the National Book Award, including a recording of Professor Irwin Corey's hilarious acceptance speech.
Read Professor Irwin Corey's acceptance speech for Pynchon's 1974 National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow.
Also, have a look at Douglas Kløvedal Lannark's exhaustive documenting of "love" in Gravity's Rainbow.
Innocence
"not letting their innocence suffer any more than it already has" 12
"How Pointsman lusts after them, pretty children [...] to use their innocence" 50
Katje's "innocence microscopically masked" 93
"Blicero has lost, years ago, all his innocence on this question." 98
Enzian "he becomes, in his innocence, Ndjambi Karunga's child" 100
"'Your little rosebud bloomed. You had nothing, not even by then your mouth's innocence, to lose....'" 104
"Leni's fair skin, her look of innocence" 156
"[Leni] knows, filled with crying for [Richard's] innocence, that he can't have been with anyone there" 157
"[Jessica] is [Roger's] deepest innocence" 177
"there are forms of innocence, [Tchitcherine] knows, that cannot conceive of what that means" 189
"an old and European pity, a look [Slothrop] will get to know, well before he loses his innocence and becomes one of them" 205
"something about the man [...] an innocence, maybe a try at being friendly in the only way he has available" 207
"The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master." 241
"he knows the sound of Their calculated innocence by now, it's part of Their style" 262
"In his innocence he saw no reason why co-workers on an office project should not practice self-criticism with the same rigor as revolutionary cells do." 276
"Yes it is a little bit jive of Ombindi here to look back toward an innocence he's really only heard about, can't himself believe in--the gathered purity of opposites, the village built like a mandala" 321
"Ombindi, at times self-conned as any Christian, praises and prophesies that era of innocence he just missed living in" 321
"like the young exiled women in their certain love, in their innocence of [Tchitcherine]" 359
"our ruinous garden, already too fouled, too crowded to qualify as any locus of innocence--unless innocence be our age's neutral, our silent passing into the machineries of indifference" 413
"In a corporate State, a place must be made for innocence, and its many uses. In developing an official version of innocence, the culture of childhood has proven invaluable." 418
Zwölfkinder's "enclave of innocence still enjoyed a high priority" 428
"'You're really pushing that innocence today, ain't you?'" [Slothrop to von Göll], 529
"so [Pirate & Katje] dissolve now [...] fade, as innocence fades, grimly flirtatious, and striving to be kind...." 548
"all [Wm. Slothrop's] Gadarene swine who'd rushed into extinction like lemmings [...] possessed by innocence they couldn't lose" 555
"a faith that each machine, individually, has simply, in innocence, gone on the blink" 586
"[Jessica's] bare nape [Roger's] never stopped loving, will never see again, unprotected as her beauty, her innocence of how forever in peril it moves through the World." 629
"Assume a state of grace in which all hairs were once distributed perfectly even, a time of innocence when they fell perfectly straight, all over the colonel's head." 643
"In their innocence, the Baby Bulbs don't know what to make of this roach's abreaction" 648
"nothing
close to the explosions in the faces of the powerful
that Byron once
envisioned, back there in his Baby ward, in his innocence." 651
"Slothrop may have chosen this gown [...] because of an athletic innocence to Fay [Wray] that he's never spoken of except to point and whisper, 'Oh, look...'" 688-89
Slothrop "dragging reluctantly, off of his grease-chevroned head, the shining wig of innocence" 690
"But Europe had gone deeper--into obsession, addiction, away from all the savage innocences." 722
"Bodine has a siren-ring [...] a return toward innocence" 740
"Gerhardt von Göll on his camera dolly, whooping with joy, barrel-assing down the long corridors at Nymphenburg. (Let us leave him here, in his transport, in his innocence)" 750
