Comparisons

Who's Counting?

From Vineland:

"If patterns of ones and zeros were 'like' patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least--an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name--its dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world. We are digits in God's computer [...]" (p.90)

New Angles

From Mason & Dixon:

"[Dixon] feels himself begin to drift somewhere else, off at an angle to the serial curve of his Life" (p.599)

From Gravity's Rainbow:

[Roger Mexico musing:] "'there's a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been taken as far as it will go [...] The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect, entirely, and strike off at some other angle'" (p.89)