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.
Mothers
"twin silver hairbrushes each in the shape of the flaming SHAEF sword, which Mother had Garrard's make up for him" 17
"Thayer's Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges sent by Slothrop's mother, Nalline, all the way from Massachusetts" 18
"Gloria and her nubile mother" 19
"big mean mother. Prentice" 20
"Allison's mother's radiogram" 23
"'Does your mother know you're out like this.' 'My mother is the war,' declares Roger Mexico" 39
"And the war, well, she is Roger's mother, she's leached at all the soft, the vulnerable inclusions of hope and praise scattered, beneath the mica-dazzle, through Roger's mineral, grave-marker self" 39
"the argyle sox Mom knitted for him to go to Harvard in" 64
"the mother with the low slung hat and silk knees leaning across Slothrop's table" 65
"colonies of that Mother City mapped wherever the enterprise is systematic death" 76
"if Watson and Rayner could successfully condition their "Infant Albert" into a reflex horror of everything furry, even of his own Mother in a fur boa" 84
"Duino Elegies [...] a gift from Mother at the boat" 99
"to write to Mutti" 103
"'I don't care if it's some terrible Freudian revenge against his mother for trying to castrate him'" 89
Slothrop's letter to Nalline, 116
"Beaver, or Jeremy, as he is known to his mother" 121
"how fanatically his mother the War must disapprove of her beauty, her cheeky indifference to death-institutions" 126
" folding the other odors in a maternal way" 130
"Everybody you don't suspect is in on this [...] your mother hoping to hang that Gold Star" 134
"an instinctive, a motherly way" 145
" a woman born under the Crab, a mother" 154
"his mother who keeps trying to smack him" 171
"Perhaps the Ci-ty dreamed [...] of being swallowed again, by the immense, the si-lent Mother Con-tinent?" 173
" Plot-ting da-ta from the maternity ward" 173
"pregnant mother bugs too" 173
"Their mother is in the W.C." 174
"Oh your mother's a big fat machine gun" 175
"Mothers and fathers are conditioned into deliberately dying in certain preferred ways" 176
"his chief obsession is to jump, or topple, on his mother" 177
"Oh Italian gin is a mother's curse" 191
" innocent incisors 'n' Momworshiping molars" 211
"the slender girl strangely grown oaken, broad, maternal" 218
"But her mother, in her own sleep, grinds her teeth often" 219
"'That's what [...] they want a great swollen tit with some atrophied excuse for a human, bleating around somewhere in its shadows. How can I be human for her? Not her mother. Mother, that's a civil-service category, Mothers work for Them! They're the policemen of the soul...'" 219
"'Domina Nocturna...shining mother and last love'" 232
" old motherly femme de chambre" 254
"politicians bickering like a bunch of putative mothers" 263
"she's old enough to be their Mothe--their joint Mother, combining the worst traits of Mrs. Perdoo and Mrs. Speed" 271
"mothers in blouses and skirts startled out of war-long camphor sleep" 273
"now and then the mothers exchange a word" 284
"Marvy's Mothers" 287
"It was his mother who'd named him after Attila the Hun" 298
"in Germany the word for electric socket is also the word for Mother" 299
"the bloodlines of mother and father were left behind, in Südwest" 316
"Mothers who used to be baby vamps" 320
"[Enzian's] mother's circular village" 322
"the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature" 324
"Oversize photos of John Dillinger, alone or posed with his mother" 368-69
"the same mother-violence underneath" 380
Tchitcherine's mother, 390
"the Baltic crawls like its mother-glacier" 398
"There were no boys--only girls, mothers" 408
"But Ilse, some Ilse, has persisted beyond her cinema mother" 429
"what Grandmother called 'a crime of passion'" 445
"Of course it will have to be all business--that's the least a mother can do." 461
Greta & Bianca: "stage mother and reluctant child" 465
"the pale lizard surfaces of her mother's shoes" 467
"like her mother she knows how horror will come when the afternoon is brightest" 471
"you whose interdiction from her mother's water-white love is absolute" 472
"I am the Shekhinah, queen, daughter, bride, and mother of God" 478
"Shekhinah, bride, queen, daughter. And mother. Motherly as sheltering mud and glowing pitchblende" 479
"an extension of her mother's ego" 484
"My mother [...] The terror of the high seas." 492
"[Bianca's] mother is hardly a destroying goddess" 494
"Be she green or scar-let, even Mom's a har-lot, it's the Good Lord's grand design" 495
Frau Gnahb, "Otto's nautical-piratical mother" 496
"that kind of slack, nameful recapitulating that Slothrop's mother Nalline loved to float away on in the afternoons" 499
"luminous breast of sky" 501
"this madmother" 504
"'Five minutes away from his mother, [Otto's] a Casanova.'" 505
Mother Conspiracy, 505
The Mothers get together once a year, in secret, at these giant conventions, and exchange information. Recipes, games, key phrases to use on their children. [...] They have a contest, for Mother of the Year, breast-feeding, diaper-changing, they time them, casserole competitions, ja--then, toward the end, they actually begin to use the children. 505
"a huge blue-flowered bowl of shredded potatoes at her elbow, a window, cast-iron flowers on spiral vine all painted white, a mild smell of cabbage and dishrags from under the sink, an apron bow snug and tight above her kidneys and lambs about her legs" 529
"I don't need a Jewish mother" 534
"Pirate has begun to cry [...] for his dead mother" 544
Old Bloody Chiclitz's mother, 558
"Her mother is carving turnips in the kitchen" 571
"framed in the light of her kitchen [...] a fading golden woman, head in a nod over a stove with a single pot simmering, flowered wallpaper deep-orange and red behind her averted face" 572-73
"[Purfle's] gray mother the John E. Badass" 598
"Mother Ground, the great, the planetary pool of electrons making you one with your prototype" 604
"'Oh you motherless bastards'" 607
"'The War's my mother,'" [Mexico] said the first day" 629
"what ladies in black appeared in his dreams, what ash-white smiles" 629
Bernie the Bulb's mother, Brenda, 649
"He will be screwed into mother (Mutter) after mother, as the female threads of German light-bulb sockets are known" 653
"who feel that same motherly help-help-but-make-sure-there's-time-for-him-to-rape-me ambivalence" 683
"a human Mother's Nipple that emerges out into the picture from the left-hand side" 707
"Frau Utgarthaloki [...] She is a blonde image of your mother dead" 712
"[Gottfried's] mother was emotional, a great flow of love, frustration and secret terror passed into him from her, but they never really talked." 721
"A broken heart, a mother's prayer" 736
"that maternal birch smacking down across each naked ass" 736
"But sharper than a Mother's tears/Are the beatings Mutti gave to me..." 736
"that maternal birch smacking down" 736
"'Isn't it possible,' Thanatz whispers, 'that we all learned that classical fantasy at Mother's knees?'" 736
the kid who hates kreplach, 737
"Last week I threw a pie at someone's Momma" 740
"The mothers have been masculinized to old worn moneybags of no sexual interest to anyone" 747
"The other way is dark and female, passive, self abandoning" 750
"like Ochsen-Augen in Grandmother's day" 751
"beckoning the child Gottfried with a motherly or eager-to-educate look" 759
