I’ve been making my way (slowly) through Pynchon’s Against The Day and thought this passage was a riot:

“Everything you appreciate with your senses, all there is in the given world to hold dear, the faces of your children, sunsets, rain, fragrances of earth, a good laugh, the touch of a lover, the blood of an enemy; your mother’s cooking, wine, music, athletic triumphs, desirable strangers, the body you feel at home in, a sea-breeze flowing over unclothed skin – all these for the devout Manichaean are evil, creations of an evil deity, phantoms and masks that have always belonged to time and excrement and darkness.”

“But it’s everything that matters,” protested Chick Counterfly.

“And a true follower of this faith had to give it all up.  No sex, not even marriage; no children, no family ties.  These being only tricks of the Darkness, there to distract us from seeking union with the Light.”

“That’s the choice?  Light or pussy? What kind of choice is that?”

“Suckling!”

“Sorry Lindsay, I meant ‘vagina’, of course!”

ROFL