Man vs. Ocean

Man says: “I am more intelligent than the ocean.” That is possible, even more or less true. But the ocean inspires more dread in him than he in the ocean.

— Les Chants de Maldoror, by the Comte de Lautrémont, pg. 22

Not a fan of California pizza...

Praire worked at the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple, which a little smugly offered the most wholesome, not to mention the slowest, fast food in the region, a classic example of the California pizza concept at its most misguided. Zoyd was both a certified pizzamaniac and a cheapskate, but not once had he ever hustled Prarie for one nepotistic slice of the Bodhi Dharma product. Its sauce was all but crunchy with fistfuls of herbs only marginally Italian and more appropriate in a cough remedy, the rennnetless cheese reminded customers variously of bottled hollandaise or joint compound, and the options were all vegetables rigorously organic, whose high water content saturated, long before it baked through, a stone-ground twelve-grain crust with the lightness and digestibility of a manhole cover.

— Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon, pg. 45