Thomas Pynchon quotes

Thomas Pynchon is an American novelist recognized for his complex and inventive works of postmodern fiction. Legendary for his reclusive lifestyle, Pynchon’s novels blend dense prose, satire, and intricate plots. He is widely acclaimed for books such as "Gravity’s Rainbow" and remains one of contemporary literature’s most enigmatic figures. Here are 147 of his quotes:

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

Thomas Pynchon

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

Thomas Pynchon

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

Thomas Pynchon

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

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

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

Thomas Pynchon

Why should things be easy to understand?

Thomas Pynchon

You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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, sometimes other orifices also.

Thomas Pynchon

Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.

Thomas Pynchon

Danger's over, Banana Breakfast is saved.

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