Out at the airport Oedipa, feeling invisible, eavesdropped on a poker game whose steady loser entered each loss neat and conscientious in a little balance-book decorated inside and out with scrawled post horns. "I'm averaging a 99.375 percent return, fellas," he heard him say. The others, strangers, looked at him, some blank, some annoyed. That's averaging it out, over 23 years, he went on, trying to smile. Always just that little percent on the wrong side of breaking even. Twenty-three years. I'll never get ahead of it. Why don't I quit?" Nobody answering. — The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

Qouted by Jane Dark, in his review of Ocean's 13