Thomas Pynchon quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Thomas Pynchon on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

It was the U.S.A., after all, and fear was in the air.

Some typewriters in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4 could have ever hoped to.

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

the one Word that rips apart the day...

Stencil had called from a Hungarian coffee shop on York Avenue known as Hungarian Coffee Shop

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

Your task, in these dreams, is often to pens.

He is a messenger from Slothrop's innocent, pre-octopus past.

What? -- RICHARD M NIXON

Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

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

The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator.

There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead.

At the corner store they invaded a hot dog stand and drank pina colada to sober up. It did no good.

Time did not so much elapse as grow less relevant.

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

Zoyd was out of smokes.

Could we have been so much in the midst of life? With such a sense of grand adventure about it all?

He didn't know whether he was planning seduction, or combat, - these, at fourteen, being the only categories of Pleasure he recogniz'd.

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

UTSL, which Maxine at first takes for an anagram of LUST or possibly SLUT but later learns is Unix for Use The Source, Luke.

His workplace has become a rat's nest of empire building, turf defense, careerism, backstabbing, betrayal, and snitchcraft.

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?

Man, I want to die, is all," cried Ploy.
"Don't you know," said Dahoud, "that life is the most precious possession you have?

You can only cruse the boulevards of regret so far, and then you've got to get back up onto the freeway again.

The past, hey no shit, it's an open invitation to wine abuse.

That joyful feelin' when-you're up-on the ceilin

Perhaps its familiarity rendered it temporarily invisible to you.

Grownups acting like the worst kind of kids, kids acting like they knew what was going on.

Everything is some kind of a plot, man.

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

I went to the zoo once and saw this thing they call an anteater. That was quite enough for me.

Next worst thing to unrequited Love, isn't it? Insufficient hate.

[ ... ] times of great idealism carry equal chances for great corruptibility.

They sit there for a minute while unknown forms of life pursue recreational activities in their food.

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

True pornography is given us by vastly patient professionals.

WE AWAIT SILENT TRISTERO'S EMPIRE.

The figure dropped like an acid tab into the mouth of Time.

How do you feel about this terrible thing?"
"Terrible," said Oedipa.
"Wonderful!

Down the toilet, lookit me,
What a silly thing ta do!
Hope nobody takes a pee,
Yippy dippy dippy doo ...

Well, ring-tailed rutabagas.

Was that how he'd died, she wondered, among dreams, crushed by the only ikon in the house?

Hey, over here! Have your picture taken with a reclusive author! Today only, we'll throw in a free autograph! But wait, there's more!

Aitisi nai poroja," replied Veikko, a pleasantry long grown routine, meaning, "Your mother fucks reindeer.

There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.

Deep Web advertising, wave of the future,

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

This spiritualist, this statistician, what are you anyway?

Doubt is the essence of Christ.

Our beauty lies in this extended capacity for convolution.

Makeup supposed to look like no makeup or whatever,

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.

All variables are independent.

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

You wait. Everyone has an Antarctic.

London the secular city instructs him: turn any corner and he can find himself inside a parable.

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

So claim'd are the Surveyors in their contra-solar Return by Might-it-bes, and If-it-weres, - not to mention What-was-thats.

She had heard all about excluded middles ; they were bad shit, to be avoided ...

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

Just don't tell me you're in love, OK?"
"Sister, I ain't even in line.

Same old Satanic pact, only more of it.

Dick" Counterfly had absquatulated swiftly into the night, leaving his son with only a pocketful of specie and the tender admonition, "Got to 'scram,

Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit.

Words are only an eye-twitch away from the things they stand for.

What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not the still photograph of finished character but the movie, the soul in flux.

Together they are a long skin interface, flowing sweat, close as muscles and bones can press, hardly a word beyond her name, or his.

Culture attracts the worst impulses of the moneyed, it has no honor, it begs to be suburbanized and corrupted.

You see how many whips and things there are here. Our horses are very, very naughty.

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

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre (attributed to a French observer during the Charge of the Light

You never want to see kids repeat your own mistakes.

Try to squeeze a watermelon into a small tumbler sometime when your reflexes are not so good. It is next to impossible.

Remember, she who keepeth the Books runneth the Business.

Runners are bouncing up and down at the curb waiting for lights to change. Cops are in coffee shops dealing with bagel deficiencies.

They but appear a solemn People, - worshipping Laughter, rather, as a serious, indeed holy, Force in Nature, never to be invok'd idly.

Now GE has connections with Siemens over here, they worked on the V-2 guidance,

Hey, like Godzilla always sez to Mothra - why don't we go eat some place?

These times are unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one

She is prey to interior winds he never felt.

Film and calculus, both pornographies of flight.

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

For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross

And when Franz Ferdinand pays, everybody pays!

Once they have you asking the wrong questions. They don't have to worry about the answers.

There was the old hippie-hating mad dog himself, moonlighting after a busy day of civil-rights violation, as pitchman for Channel View Estates.

Maxine recoils, only partly out of the classic accountant's allergy to real folding money

Not that the crew of the Toiletship itself were above a practical joke now and then.

Is it just this miserable fucking city, too many faces, making us crazy? Are we seeing some wholesale return of the dead?"
"You'd prefer retail?

Two of them there drinking red liquor like it was sadness medicine.

Don't commit original sin. Try and let her just be.

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

Keep it bouncing," he'd told her once, "that's all the secret, keep it bouncing.

I don't do lunch. Corrupt artifact of late capitalism. Breakfast maybe?

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

Yeah, actually, gamers in the house forever.

Not everybody benefits from a misspent youth.

Length is usually intensity.
Not time.