Thomas Pynchon

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

— Thomas Pynchon

Why should things be easy to understand?

— Thomas Pynchon

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

— Thomas Pynchon

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

— 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

Here's your quote: "Thomas Pynchon loved this book, almost as much as he loves cameras!" 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!

— Thomas Pynchon

Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneaker and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia.

— 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

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

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

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

— 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

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

— Thomas Pynchon

"You one of those right wing nut outfits?" inquired the diplomatic Metzger. "Us?" asked Oedipa.

— 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

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

“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

“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

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

— Thomas Pynchon

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

— 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

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

— Thomas Pynchon

Flotsam from his childhood are rising through his attention. He's remembering the skin of an apple, bursting with nebulae, a look into curved reddening space.

— Thomas Pynchon

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. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals.

— Thomas Pynchon

Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts.

— Thomas Pynchon

Tibet is a special case. Tibet was deliberately set aside by the Empire as free and neutral territory, a Switzerland for the spirit where there is no extradition, and Alp-Himalayas to draw the soul upward, and danger rare enough to tolerate.

— Thomas Pynchon

They are in love. Fuck the war.

— 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

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

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

He lies on top of her, sweating, taking great breaths, watching her face turned 3/4 away, not even a profile, but the terrible Face That is No Face, gone too abstract, unreachable: the notch of the eye socket, but never the labile eye, only the anonymous curve of cheek, convexity of mouth, a noseless mask of the Other Order of Being, of Katje's being — the lifeless non-face that is the only face of hers he really knows, or will ever remember.

— Thomas Pynchon

Proverbs for Paranoids:

— Thomas Pynchon

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

— Thomas Pynchon

The man's thirst for guilt was insatiable as the desert's for water.

— Thomas Pynchon

She watches Marvy's face as he pays Monika, watches him in this primal American act, paying, more deeply himself than when coming, or asleep, or maybe even dying.

— 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

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

It can get pretty fascist in here...

— Thomas Pynchon

M-maybe there is a Machine to take us away, take us completely, suck us through the electrodes out of the skull 'n' into the Machine and live there forever with all the other souls it's got stored there. It could decide who it would suck out, a-and when. Dope never gave you immortality. You hadda come back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly meat! But We can live forever, in a clean, honest, purified, Electroworld —

— 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

Each will have his personal Rocket.

— 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 ..." Now —

— Thomas Pynchon

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

— Thomas Pynchon

"Arrh! Stars and Mud, ever conjugate, a Paradox to consider, — one…for the Astronomer-Royal, perhaps?" His current scheme being, to assail Maskelyne's Sanity, by now and then posing to him Questions that will not bear too much cogitating upon, — most lately, Über Bernouillis Brachistochronsprobleme, 1702 by Baron von Boppdörfer ("Mind like a Spanish Blade. Read it at the Risk of your Self-Esteem.") having almost done the Trick.

— Thomas Pynchon

What, a Re-Peat!

— Thomas Pynchon

No need to feel pleas'd with yourself. What you found was not their sacred Well, but only a Representation of it.

— 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

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

— 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

If the U.S. was a person," he later became fond of saying, "and it sat down, Columbus, Ohio would instantly be plunged into darkness

— Thomas Pynchon

All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.

— Thomas Pynchon

Charlie really has this, like, obsessive death wish! Yes! he, he wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty, man, deep parable of consumer capitalism, they won't be happy with anything less than drift-netting us all, chopping us up and stacking us on the shelves of Supermarket Amerika, and subconsciously the horrible thing is, is we want them to do it...

— 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

Everybody here drove around like a dedicated loser, expecting moment to moment to get into an accident. Doc could relate to this — it was like the beach, where you lived in a climate of unquestioning hippie belief, pretending to trust everybody while always expecting to be sold out — but he didn't have to enjoy that either, especially.

— Thomas Pynchon

Paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much.

— Thomas Pynchon

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

— Thomas Pynchon

And one cried wee, wee, wee, all the way—" Jessica breaking down in a giggle as he reaches for the spot along her sweatered flank he knows she can't bear to be tickled in. She hunches, squirming, out of the way as he rolls past, bouncing off the back of the sofa but making a nice recovery, and by now she's ticklish all over, he can grab an ankle, elbow—

— 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

Shit, money, and the World, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country's fate. But they did not prosper... about all they did was persist

— Thomas Pynchon