Top 100 Thomas Pynchon Quotes
#1. People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history's rags and straws.
Thomas Pynchon
#2. Toward dusk, the black birds descend, millions of them, to sit in the branches of trees nearby. The trees grow heavy with black birds, branches like dendrites of the Nervous System fattening, deep in twittering nerve-dusk, in preparation for some important message ... .
Thomas Pynchon
#3. It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus.
Thomas Pynchon
#4. Look at this. A barstool, named Sven? Some old Swedish custom, the winter kicks in, weather gets harsh, after a while you find yourself relating to the furniture in ways you didn't expect?
Thomas Pynchon
#5. There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.
Thomas Pynchon
#6. All this home-computer gaming, Nintendo 64, PlayStation, now this Xbox thing, maybe I just want the boys to see what blowing aliens away was like in the olden days.
Thomas Pynchon
#7. Some typewriters in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4 could have ever hoped to.
Thomas Pynchon
#8. It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.
Thomas Pynchon
#10. Out the window in the distance, contradicting the prairie, a mirage of downtown Chicago ascended to a kind of lurid acropolis, its light as if from nightly immolation warped to the red end of the spectrum, smoldering as if always just about to explode into open flames.
Thomas Pynchon
#11. You never want to see kids repeat your own mistakes.
Thomas Pynchon
#12. Here was world of simplicity and certainty no acidhead, no revolutionary anarchist would ever find, a world based on the one and zero of life and death. Minimal, beautiful. The patterns of life and deaths ...
Thomas Pynchon
#13. Down the toilet, lookit me,
What a silly thing ta do!
Hope nobody takes a pee,
Yippy dippy dippy doo ...
Thomas Pynchon
#14. What North Europe thinks of as its history is actually quite provincial and of limited interest. Different sorts of Christian killing each other, and that's about it.
Thomas Pynchon
#15. That night she sat for hours, too numb to even drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vaccum. For this, oh God, was the void.
Thomas Pynchon
#16. I still don't even know for sure what a tendril is.
Thomas Pynchon
#17. C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre (attributed to a French observer during the Charge of the Light
Thomas Pynchon
#18. Mason glowers, shaking his head. I've ascended, descended, even condescended, and the List's not ended, - but haven't yet trans-cended a blessed thing, thankee.
Thomas Pynchon
#19. Men had it so simple. When it wasn't about Sticking It In, it was about Having The Gun, a variation that allowed them to Stick It In from a distance.
Thomas Pynchon
#20. (On the book "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me") Coming on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch. Hilarious, chilling, sexy, profound, maniacal, beautiful and outrageous all at the same time.
Thomas Pynchon
#21. Anyone who wonders what Imps look like in their Middle Years would be perhaps more than satisfied with Shelby's Phiz at the moment, - Malice undiminish'd, with a Daily Schedule that leaves him too little time to express it.
Thomas Pynchon
#22. But there I was, surrendering to a most extraordinary call from the grave, the mass-grave-to-be of Europe, as if somewhere ahead lay an iron gateway, slightly ajar, leading to a low and sombre country, with an incalculable crowd on sides eager to pass into it, and bearing me along.
Thomas Pynchon
#23. [Oedipa Maas] awoke at last to find herself getting laid.
Thomas Pynchon
#24. Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country's fate.
Thomas Pynchon
#25. A pneumatic toy frog hops onto a lily pad, trembling. Beneath the surface, lies terror.
Thomas Pynchon
#26. Not the first time Doc had run into girl-of-his-dreams unavailability.
Thomas Pynchon
#27. The Stars are so close you won't need a Telescope." "The Fish jump into your Arms. The Indians know Magick." "We'll go there. We'll live there." "We'll fish there. And you too.
Thomas Pynchon
#28. Doc was into his own apprenticeship as a skip tracer, and each, gradually locating a different karmic thermal above the megalopolis, had watched the other glide away into a different fate.
Thomas Pynchon
#29. This generation - it's almost a religious thing now. The millennium, the end days, no need to be responsible anymore to the future. A burden has been lifted from them. The Baby Jesus is managing the portfolio of earthly affairs, and nobody begrudges Him the carried interest ...
Thomas Pynchon
#30. When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it with a transparent surface parallel to your own front that hums and bisects both your ears, making eyes very alert. The light bends toward chalky blue. Your skin aches. At last: something real.
Thomas Pynchon
#32. Well, and keep in mind where those Masonic Mysteries came from in the first place. (Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you'll ever find here.)
Thomas Pynchon
#33. This spiritualist, this statistician, what are you anyway?
Thomas Pynchon
#34. 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
#35. Oh, this beer here is cold, cold and hop-bitter, no point coming up for air, gulp, till it's all
hahhhh.
Thomas Pynchon
#36. Aitisi nai poroja," replied Veikko, a pleasantry long grown routine, meaning, "Your mother fucks reindeer.
Thomas Pynchon
#37. A woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.
Thomas Pynchon
#38. Tis useful nonetheless, now and then, to regard Politics here, as the greater American Question in Miniature, - in the way that Chess represents war, - with Governor Penn a game-piece in the form of the King.
Thomas Pynchon
#39. How do you feel about this terrible thing?"
"Terrible," said Oedipa.
"Wonderful!
Thomas Pynchon
#40. As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.
Thomas Pynchon
#41. Makeup supposed to look like no makeup or whatever,
Thomas Pynchon
#42. He didn't know whether he was planning seduction, or combat, - these, at fourteen, being the only categories of Pleasure he recogniz'd.
Thomas Pynchon
#43. As long as American life was something to be escaped from, the cartel would always be assured a bottomless pool of new customers.
Thomas Pynchon
#46. Failing to look inscrutable to any but the habitually dismissive ...
Thomas Pynchon
#48. He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.
Thomas Pynchon
#49. Remember, God didn't say, 'I'm gonna make light now,' he said, 'Let there be light.' His first act was to allow light in to what had been Nothing. Like God, you also have to always work with the light, make it do only what you want it to do.
Thomas Pynchon
#50. Social Darwinists of the day were forever on about the joys of bloody teeth and claws, but they were curiously uncelebratory of speed and deception, poison and surprise.
Thomas Pynchon
#51. Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together.
Thomas Pynchon
#53. Words are only an eye-twitch away from the things they stand for.
Thomas Pynchon
#54. Down here everything was dark, but up there the gray conglomerate was being struck by the final light of day to an unanswerable brilliance.
Thomas Pynchon
#55. Out of the blackness of the ward, a half-open file drawer of pain each bed a folder, come cries, struck cries, as from cold metal.
Thomas Pynchon
#56. If you look from the side at a planet swinging around in its orbit, split the sun with a mirror and imagine a string, it all looks like a yo-yo. The point furthest from the sun is called aphelion. The point furthest from the yo-yo hand is called, by analogy, apocheir.
Thomas Pynchon
#57. You're so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew.
Thomas Pynchon
#58. They but appear a solemn People, - worshipping Laughter, rather, as a serious, indeed holy, Force in Nature, never to be invok'd idly.
Thomas Pynchon
#59. Runners are bouncing up and down at the curb waiting for lights to change. Cops are in coffee shops dealing with bagel deficiencies.
Thomas Pynchon
#60. I have look'd on Worlds far distant, their Beauty how pitiless.
Thomas Pynchon
#61. Trystero. The word hung in the air as the act ended and all lights were for a moment cut; hung in the dark to puzzle Oedipa Maas, but not yet to exert the power over her it was to.
Thomas Pynchon
#62. Some of us are Outlaws, and some Trespassers upon the very World.
Thomas Pynchon
#64. How many times," continued Lindsay Noseworth, second-in-command here and known for his impatience with all manifestations of the slack, "have you been warned, Suckling, against informality of speech?
Thomas Pynchon
#65. Time did not so much elapse as grow less relevant.
Thomas Pynchon
#66. 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
#67. Around then Jade happened by again. "Thought that was you," Doc said, "though we ain't exactly been wallerin in eye contact. Got your note at the office, but why'd you go runnin away like that? we could've hung out, you know, smoke some shit.
Thomas Pynchon
#68. Damn you all. You have no idea what you're heading into. This world you take to be 'the' world will die, and descend into Hell, and all history after that will belong properly to the history of Hell.
Thomas Pynchon
#69. Stencil had called from a Hungarian coffee shop on York Avenue known as Hungarian Coffee Shop
Thomas Pynchon
#70. People who dress up in bizarre costumes have a savoir-vivre - not to mention the sort of personality disorder - that he admires.
Thomas Pynchon
#71. What, I should only trust good people? Man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense.
Thomas Pynchon
#74. True pornography is given us by vastly patient professionals.
Thomas Pynchon
#75. What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove's difference and the universe can be on into a whole 'nother song.
Thomas Pynchon
#77. If the world offered nothing, nowhere to support or make bearable whatever her private grief was, then it is that world, and not she, that is at fault.
Thomas Pynchon
#78. As if auditioning for widowhood, Sloane Wolfmann strolled in from poolside wearing black spiked-heeled sandals, a headband with a sheer black veil, and a black bikini of negligible size and made of the same material as the veil.
Thomas Pynchon
#79. 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
#80. Now GE has connections with Siemens over here, they worked on the V-2 guidance,
Thomas Pynchon
#81. Maxine recoils, only partly out of the classic accountant's allergy to real folding money
Thomas Pynchon
#82. 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
#83. She has stepped out into a different night, a different town altogether, one of those first-person-shooter towns that you can drive around in seemingly forever, but never away from. The only humanity visible are virtual extras in the distance, none offering any of the help she needs.
Thomas Pynchon
#84. You can only cruse the boulevards of regret so far, and then you've got to get back up onto the freeway again.
Thomas Pynchon
#85. Staff who claim not to know a word of English beyond "awesome" and "sucks," which for a vast range of human endeavor, actually, is more than enough . . .
Thomas Pynchon
#86. The figure dropped like an acid tab into the mouth of Time.
Thomas Pynchon
#87. They talked in the car always, he trying to find the key to her own ignition behind the hooded eyes, she sitting back of the right-hand steering wheel and talking, talking, nothing but MG-words, inanimate-words he couldn't really talk back at. Soon
Thomas Pynchon
#88. His workplace has become a rat's nest of empire building, turf defense, careerism, backstabbing, betrayal, and snitchcraft.
Thomas Pynchon
#89. He sat forlorn, feeling as if that most feared enemy of sleep had entered silently on a busy night, the one person whom you must come face to face with someday, who asks you, in the earshot of your oldest customers, to mix a cocktail whose name you have never heard.
Thomas Pynchon
#90. 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
#91. She would give them order. She would create constellations.
Thomas Pynchon
#92. To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.
Thomas Pynchon
#93. Westside Hochdeutsch mafia, biggest of the big, construction, savings and loans, untaxed billions stashed under an Alp someplace, technically Jewish but wants to be a Nazi, becomes exercised often to the point of violence at those who forget to spell his name with two n's. What's he to you?
Thomas Pynchon
#94. These times are unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one
Thomas Pynchon
#95. Reef lit a hemp-and-tobacco cigarette and reviewed his situation, while around him infectious melodies and rhythms went on refashioning the night.
Thomas Pynchon
#96. There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.
Thomas Pynchon
#97. As spread thighs are to the libertine ... so was the letter V to young Stencil.
Thomas Pynchon
#98. Pointsman is finding it much easier to of late to slip into a l'etat c'est moi frame of mind
who else is doing anything?
Thomas Pynchon
#99. On the face of it," Vehi Fairfield said finally, "two separate worlds, each unaware of the other. But they always connect someplace.
Thomas Pynchon
#100. Onto Chastity Bjornsen's car radio came the drawling irreverent brass and subhip syncopation of a Herb Alpert arrangement, which Doc realized with growing horror was a cover of Ohio Express's "Yummy Yummy Yummy." He
Thomas Pynchon
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