Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

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

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

Thomas Pynchon
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
"Whenever I put the headsets on now," he'd continued, "I really do understand what I find there. When those kids sing about 'She loves you,' yeah, well, you know, she does, she's any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, shapes, sizes, distances from death, but she loves. And the 'you' is everybody. And herself."

Thomas Pynchon
There'd been no escape. What did she so desire to escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: and what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited upon her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disc jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?

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

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

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

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

Thomas Pynchon
This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl.

Thomas Pynchon
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
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
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
For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.

Thomas Pynchon
Teamwork," Koteks snarled, "is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It's a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.

Thomas Pynchon