Best Pynchon Quotes

#1. People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history's rags and straws. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#2. The past, hey no shit, it's an open invitation to wine abuse. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#3. 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 ... . - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#4. A screaming comes across the sky. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#5. Poetry is not communication with angels or with the "subconscious." It is communication with the guts, genitals, and five portals of sense. Nothing more. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#6. Same old Satanic pact, only more of it. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#7. For many people laughing is a way of being loud without having to say a thing. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#8. Non-Masons stay pretty much in the dark about What Goes On, though now and then something jumps out, exposes itself, jumps giggling back again, leaving you with few details but a lot of Awful Suspicions. Some - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#9. 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. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#10. And over my head," relates Squire Haligast, "it form'd an E-clipse, an emptiness in the Sky, with a Cloud-shap'd Line drawn all about it, wherein words might appear, and it read, - 'No King . . . - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#11. I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which the pre-historic wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#12. You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world's intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there's cataclysm. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#13. 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? - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#14. I used to worry about you, Zoyd, but I see I can rest easy now the Vaseline of youth has been cleared from your life's lens by the mild detergent solution of time, in its passing. . . - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#15. There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#16. 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. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#17. All variables are independent. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#18. My belief is that 'recluse' is a code word generated by journalists ... meaning, doesn't like to talk to reporters ... - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#19. Some typewriters in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4 could have ever hoped to. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#20. Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#21. The grandeur of space, dig it. Zillions of stars, each one gets its own pixel."
"Awesome."
"Maybe, but it's code's all it is. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#22. 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. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#23. Shall I project a world? - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#24. Where may one breathe?" demands one Continental Macaroni, in a yellow waistcoat, " - in New-York, Taverns have rooms where Smoke is prohibited." "Tho' clearly," replies the itinerant Stove-Salesman Mr. Whitpot, drawing vigorously at his Pipe, "what's needed is a No-Idiots Area. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#25. What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

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

#27. Why should things be easy to understand? - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#28. Remember that Puritans were utterly devoted, like literary critics, to the Word. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#29. She has assisted at more than one Birth, has endur'd a hard-drinking and quarrelsome troop of Men-Folk, - who is this unfamily'd man in a Frock to call her child? - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#30. That joyful feelin' when-you're up-on the ceilin - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#31. I mean only that in our Times, 'tis not a rare Dispute," Maskelyne assures him. "Reason, or any Vocation to it,
the Pursuit of the Sciences,
these are the hope of the Young, the new Music their Families cannot follow, occasionally not even listen to. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#32. 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. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#33. You never want to see kids repeat your own mistakes. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#34. [ ... ] little Belgium once again busy at what she does best, tamely offering her battlefield-ready lowlands to boots, hooves, iron wheels, waiting to be first to go under before a future no one in Europe has the clairvoyance to imagine as anything more than an exercise for clerks. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#35. It was luck, dumb luck, that had put them each where they were, and the best way to pay for any luck, however temporary, was just to be helpful when you could. - Author: Thomas Pynchon

#36. 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. - Author: Thomas Pynchon