Thomas Pynchon quotes - page 2

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:

I want to break out - to leave this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered inseparable, into the radiance of what we would become....

Thomas Pynchon

Who has sent this new serpent into our ruinous garden, already too fouled, too crowded to qualify as any locus of innocence - unless innocence be our age's neutral, our silent passing into the machineries of indifference - something that Kekulé's Serpent had come to - not to destroy, but to define to us the loss of... we had been given certain molecules, certain combinations and not others... we used what we found in Nature, unquestioning, shamefully perhaps - but the Serpent whispered, 'They can be changed, and new molecules assembled from the debris of the given.... ' Can anyone tell me what else he whispered to us? Come - who knows?

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

"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 ..." Always remember. The first star hangs between his feet. Now.

Thomas Pynchon

Have you ever fall'n into one of those Cometary Dazes, with the way the Object grows brighter and brighter each night? These Apparitions in the Sky, we never observe them but in Motion, - gone in seconds, and if they return, we do not see them. Once safely a part of the Night Sky, they may hang there at their Pleasure, performing whatever their Work corresponds to shifting jibs and stay-sails, keeping perfectly upon Station, mimicking any faint, unnam'd Star you please. Do they watch us? Are they visits from the past, from an Age of Faith, when Miracles still literally happen'd?

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

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

"Personal density," Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemünde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, "is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth." "Temporal bandwidth," is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "∆ t" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.

Thomas Pynchon

Politics is a kind of engineering isn't it. With people as your raw material.

Thomas Pynchon

It creeped him out, the way it just sat there looking so plastic and harmless among the old-time good intentions of all that downtown architecture, no more sinister than a chain motel by the freeway, and yet behind its neutral drapes and far away down its fluorescent corridors it was swarming with all this strange alternate cop history and cop politics-cop dynasties, cop heroes and evildoers, saintly cops and psycho cops, cops too stupid to live and cops too smart for their own good-insulated by secret loyalties and codes of silence from the world they'd all be given to control, or, as they liked to put it, protect and serve.

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

Whenever I put the headsets on now," he'd continued, "I really do understand what I find there. When those kids sing about 'She loves you,' yeah, well, you know, she does, she's any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, shapes, sizes, distances from death, but she loves. And the 'you' is everybody. And herself.

Thomas Pynchon

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

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

It's a Rocket-raising: a festival new to this country. Soon it will come to the folk-attention how close Wernher von Braun's birthday is to the Spring Equinox, and the same German impulse that once rolled flower-boats through the towns and staged mock battles between young Spring and deathwhite old Winter will be erecting strange floral towers out in the clearings and meadows, and the young scientist-surrogate will be going round and round with Gravity or some such buffoon, and the children will be tickled, and laugh....

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

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

It is usually not wise to discuss matters of costume with people like this, - politics or religion being far safer topicks.

Thomas Pynchon

Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.

Thomas Pynchon

The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.

Thomas Pynchon

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

Thomas Pynchon

Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers, - Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin... Alas the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers, - nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other, - her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit, - that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever, - not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All, - rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in Common.

Thomas Pynchon