Thomas Pynchon Quotes

130 Sourced Quotes

Death glided by, shadowless, among the empties on the grass.

Thomas Pynchon
He was visited on a lunar basis by these great unspecific waves of horniness, whereby all women within a certain age group and figure envelope became immediately and impossibly desirable. He emerged from these spells with eyeballs still oscillating and a wish that his neck could rotate through the full 360 degrees.

Thomas Pynchon
It is usually not wise to discuss matters of costume with people like this, — politics or religion being far safer topicks.

Thomas Pynchon
"The edge of evening … the long curve of people all wishing on the first star.... Always remember those men and women along the thousands of miles of land and sea. The true moment of shadow is the moment in which you see the point of light in the sky. The single point, and the Shadow that has just gathered you in its sweep..."
Always remember.
The first star hangs between his feet.
Now —

Thomas Pynchon
Dream tonight of peacock tails, / Diamond fields and spouter whales. / Ills are many, blessings few, / But dreams tonight will shelter you.

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

Thomas Pynchon
Those must have all been important to me once. What I am now grew from that. A former self is a fool, an insufferable ass, but he's still human, you'd no more turn him out than you'd turn out any kind of cripple, would you?

Thomas Pynchon
The only consolation he drew from the present chaos was that his theory managed to explain it.

Thomas Pynchon
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
I want to break out — to leave this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered inseparable, into the radiance of what we would become....

Thomas Pynchon
What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?

Thomas Pynchon
Write by WASTE. The government will open it if you use the other. The dolphins will be mad. Love the dolphins.

Thomas Pynchon
Liebig himself seems to have occupied the role of a gate, or sorting-demon, such as his younger contemporary Clerk Maxwell once proposed, helping to concentrate energy into one favored room of the Creation at the expense of everything else.
Of Justus von Liebig

Thomas Pynchon
It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.

Thomas Pynchon
You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

Thomas Pynchon
If there is something comforting – religious, if you want – about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

Thomas Pynchon
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
Merle's all-night illumination prolonged itself into an inescapable glow that began to keep him awake.

Thomas Pynchon
I did not write those letters. This has been a hoax that I've had nothing to do with. I'm sorry it's gone on as long as it has.

Thomas Pynchon
It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.

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

Thomas Pynchon
It went on for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day.

Thomas Pynchon
Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.

Thomas Pynchon
Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.

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

Thomas Pynchon
"You one of those right wing nut outfits?" inquired the diplomatic Metzger.
Fallopian twinkled. "They accuse us of being paranoids."
"They?" inquired Metzger, twinkling also.
"Us?" asked Oedipa.

Thomas Pynchon
A million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it.

Thomas Pynchon
Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.

Thomas Pynchon
It's a giant factory-state here, a City of the Future full of extrapolated 1930's swoop-facaded and balconied skyscrapers, lean chrome caryatids with bobbed hairdos, classy airships of all descriptions drifting in the boom and hush of the city abysses, golden lovelies sunning in roof gardens and turning to wave as you pass.

Thomas Pynchon
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