Thomas Pynchon Quotes

130 Sourced Quotes

Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power, — who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government.

Thomas Pynchon
You're Orthodox? No. Conservative? Young people never are. My parents were Orthodox. They believe, I believe, that whatever your father is, as long as your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish too because we all come from our mother's womb. A long unbroken chain of Jewish mothers going all the way back to Eve.

Thomas Pynchon
So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.

Thomas Pynchon
For a boy not getting any he had more woman problems than anybody he knew.

Thomas Pynchon
She has turned her face, more than once, to the Outer Radiance and simply seen nothing there. And so each time taken a little more of the Zero into herself. It comes down to courage, at worst an amount of self-deluding that's vanishingly small: he has to admire it, even if he can't accept her glassy wastes, her appeals to a day not of wrath but of final indifference....

Thomas Pynchon
"Run away with me," said Roseman when the coffee came.
"Where?" she asked. That shut him up.

Thomas Pynchon
She's almost got it; nearly understands his Poisson equation...

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

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

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

Thomas Pynchon
But a hard-on, that's either there, or it isn't. Binary, elegant. The job of observing it can even be done by a student.

Thomas Pynchon
I'm sorry. That's the Monte Carlo Fallacy. No matter how many have fallen inside a particular square, the odds remain the same as they always were. Each hit is independent of all the others. Bombs are not dogs. No link. No memory. No conditioning.

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

Thomas Pynchon
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
The Lord's angel, Gebrail, dictated the Koran to Mohammed the Lord's Prophet. What a joke if all that holy book were only twenty-three years of listening to the desert. A desert which has no voice.

Thomas Pynchon
That he must always be lovable, in need of her and never, as now, the hovering statistical cherub who's never quite been to hell but speaks as if he's one of the most fallen.

Thomas Pynchon
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
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
I apologize if I've interrupted some exceptionally demanding hippie task, like trying to remember where the glue is on the Zig-Zag paper, but it seems we have yet another problem, not unconnected with this fatality of yours for introducing disaster into every life you touch, however glancingly.

Thomas Pynchon
"You." A finger the size of a corncob, an inch from Slothrop's nose.
...
"Look," Slothrop's friend producing a kraft-paper envelope that even in the gloom Slothrop can tell is fat with American Army yellow-seal scrip, "I want you to hold this for me, till I ask for it back. It looks like Italo is going to get here before Tamara, and I'm not sure which one"
"At this rate, Tamara's gonna get here before tonight," Slothrop interjects in a Groucho Marx voice.
"Don't try to undermine my confidence in you," advises the Large One. "You're the man."

Thomas Pynchon
Explosion without an objective', declared Miles Blundell, 'is politics in its purest form'.

Thomas Pynchon
Non-Masons stay pretty much in the dark about What Goes On, though now and then something jumps out, exposes itself, jumps giggling back again, leaving you with few details but a lot of Awful Suspicions.

Thomas Pynchon
Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide...

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

Thomas Pynchon
But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.

Thomas Pynchon
It was impossible to get a decent meal, or even snack, anywhere, burned flapjacks and vulcanized steaks being as appetizing as things got. It also quickly became evident — horribly evident — that no one in the city knew how to make coffee, as if there were some sort of stultified consensus, or even city ordinance, about never waking up.

Thomas Pynchon
We simply gow up. In Florence, at age fifty-four, I was a brash youth. Had I known the Duse was there her poet chap might have found dangerous competition, ha-ha. The only trouble is that now, nearing eighty, I keep discovering that damned war has made the world older than I. The world frowns now on youth in a vacuum, it insists youth be turned-to, utilized, exploited. No time for pranks. No more Vheissus.

Thomas Pynchon
He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: It only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment.

Thomas Pynchon
The illustrations were woodcuts, executed with that crude haste to see the finished product that marks the amateur. True pornography is given us by vastly patient professionals.

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

Thomas Pynchon