Thomas Pynchon famous quotes

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#War #Worry #Answers

Why should things be easy to understand?
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Easy #Should

Oh, this beer here is cold, cold and hop-bitter, no point coming up for air, gulp, till it's all--hahhhh.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Funny #Beer #Air

There is a theory going around that the U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the group known as the Illuminati. It is difficult to look for long at the strange single eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the story, a little. Too many anarchists in 19th-century Europe—Bakunin, Proudhon, Salverio Friscia—were Masons for it to be pure chance. Lovers of global conspiracy, not all of them Catholic, can count on the Masons for a few good shivers and voids when all else fails.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Believe #Eye #Europe

Time is never wasted if you remember to bring along something to read.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Remember

Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no "moments of truth." It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which thenselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one's own unanswered.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Prayer #Fall #Godly

Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#World #Wavelength #Weirdo

A screaming comes across the sky.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Sky

Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem ...
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Law #Murphy

If patterns of ones and zeros were 'like' patterns of human lives and death, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Life #Long #Would Be

There is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Real #Decision #Lines

I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy." Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Littles #Poison #Fantasy

Let the peace of this day be here tomorrow when I wake up.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Peace #Wake Up #Tomorrow

Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Dream #Essence #Idle

My belief is that 'recluse' is a code word generated by journalists ... meaning, 'doesn't like to talk to reporters'.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Belief #Recluse #Journalist

Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Dream #Real #Together

There are stories, like maps that agree... too consistent among too many languages and histories to be only wishful thinking.... It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Spiritual #Thinking #Light

All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Men #Animal #Broken

What’s this? What are the antagonists doing here – infiltrating their own audience? Well, they’re not really. It’s somebody else’s audience at the moment, and these nightly spectacles are an appreciable part of the darkside hours of life of the rocket capital. The chances for any paradox here, really, are less than you think.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Thinking #Rockets #Chance

So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be – its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Dream #Memories #Loss

There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance...
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Differences #Chance #Behavior

For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Vampire #Kind #Crosses

It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Atheist #Home #Broken

The Saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor than was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe or outside, lost.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Lying #Tunnels #Light

To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Moving #Humanity #Firsts

Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Loneliness #Land #Dying

Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Hieroglyphics #Earth #Paranoia

He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Suffering #Born #Homesickness

You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there’s cataclysm.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Miracle #World #Intrusion

Length is usually intensity. Not time.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Intensity #Length

Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Let Me

Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information machines.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Information #Machines #Done

Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Real #Dope #Insane

The anarchist is dressed all in black. In the dark you can only see his eyes. It dates from the 1930's. Porky Pig is a little boy. The children told me that he has a nephew now, Cicero. Do you remember, during the war, when Porky worked in a defense plant? He and Bugs Bunny. That was a good one too.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Children #War #Eye

In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on as a heat engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Men #Nuclear #Neutrons

Right and left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouse of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets manipulated by mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Past #Violence #Affair

A number of frail girls... prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Girl #Numbers #Towers

The reality is in this head. Mine. I'm the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, and sometimes other orifices also.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Eye #Reality #Circles

If America was a person, and it sat down, Lancaster town would be plunged into a Darkness unbreathable.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#America #Darkness #Towns

If the world offered nothing, nowhere to support or make bearable whatever her private grief was, then it is that world, and not she, that is at fault.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Grief #Support #World

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Dream #Past #Lasts

What sort of an age is this where a man becomes one's enemy only when his back is turned?
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Men #Enemy #Age

Can't say it often enough—change your hair, change your life.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Hair #Changing Your Life #Enough

Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Cute #Character #Pages

I was dreaming ... about my grandfather. A very old man, at least as old as I am now, 91. I thought, when I was a boy, that he had been 91 all his life. Now I feel as if I have been 91 all my life.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Dream #Boys #Men

Our history is an aggregate of last moments
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Lasts #Moments

She thougt of sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Sunrise #Library #West

Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person's time line sideways till they all coincide.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Zero #Lines #Want

MARG: You are so close.STEN: To whom? Margravine, not even to himself. This place, this island: all his life he's done nothing but hop from island to island. Is that a reason? Does there have to be a reason? Shall he tell you: he works for no Whitehall, non conceivable unless, ha, ha, the network of white halls in his own brain: these featureless corridors he keeps swept and correct for occasional visiting agents.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#White #Islands #Brain

Perhaps its familiarity rendered it temporarily invisible to you.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Book #Invisible #Familiarity

Ills are many, blessings few, but dreams tonight will shelter you.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Dream #Blessing #Shelter

A woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Two #Two Sides #Sides

Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ***** or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Love You #Care #Mouths

Shall I project a world?
-- Thomas Pynchon

#World #Projects

Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs--what were the chances of finding anyone else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it?
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Government #World #Narrative

My mother is the war,' declares Roger Mexico, leaning over to open the door.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Mother #War #Doors

She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike "clues" were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Dream #Night #Law

Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Greed #Abuse #Power Of Love

[Oedipa Maas] awoke at last to find herself getting laid.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Lasts #Getting Laid

What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing? --Gravity's Rainbow, V699
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Stars #Healing #Rainbow

But with a sigh he had released her hand, while she was so lost in the fantasy that she hadn't felt it go away, as if he'd known the best moment to let go.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Letting Go #Hands #Going Away

But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice -- guessed and refused to believe -- that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the rainbow, and they its children. . . .
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Children #Believe #Moving

But on the way home tonight, you wish you'd picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As it it were you who could, somehow, save him. For the moment not caring who you're supposed to be registered as. For the moment, anyway, no longer who the Caesars say you are.
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Heart #Sleep #Home

We are here among you as seekers of refuge from our present-your future-a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty-the end of the capitalistic experiment. Once we came to understand the simpl...truth that earth's resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the whole capitalistic illusion fell to pieces. Those of us who spoke this truth were denounced as heretics, as enemies of the prevailing economic faith. Like religious Dissenters of an earlier day...
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Running #Religious #Enemy

But a few choosing to venture deeper into the painful corridors of their affliction, found after a while that they could now grind and polish ever more exotic surfaces, hyperboloidial and even stranger, eventually including what we must term ‘imaginary’ shapes (which some preferred to term invisible).
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Exotic #Affliction #Shapes

This spiritualist, this statistician, what are you anyway?
-- Thomas Pynchon

#Statistician