Thomas Pynchon quotes - page 5

Don't try to undermine my confidence in you. (Thomas Pynchon)
When Marilyn Monroe got out of the game, I wrote something like, "Southern California's special horror notwithstanding, 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." View quote
Thomas Pynchon
At this rate, Tamara's gonna get here before tonight. View quote
Thomas Pynchon
There'd been no escape. What did she so desire to escape from? View quote
Thomas Pynchon
She would give them order. She would create constellations. View quote
Thomas Pynchon
In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. View quote
Thomas Pynchon
Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings. View quote
Thomas Pynchon
The pattern would have been familiar-bohemian, creative, arty-except that it was even further removed from reality, Romanticism in its furthest decadence; being only an exhausted impersonation of poverty, rebellion and artistic "soul.” For it was the unhappy fact that most of them worked for a living and obtained the substance of their conversation from the pages of Time magazine and like publications. View quote
Thomas Pynchon
The world is at fault, not because it is inherently good or bad or anything but what it is, but because it doesn't prepare us in anything but body to get along with. View quote
Thomas Pynchon
The only consolation he drew from the present chaos was that his theory managed to explain it. View quote
Thomas Pynchon
Now, nothing in the Sky looks the same. (Thomas Pynchon)
Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity - most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. View quote
Thomas Pynchon
As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day. View quote
Thomas Pynchon
So much has to be left behind now, so quickly. View quote
Thomas Pynchon
Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof, or pattern anywhere else. View quote
Thomas Pynchon
LATER than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof. In his dream these had been carrier pigeons from someplace far across the ocean, landing and taking off again one by one, each bearing a message for him, but none of whom, light pulsing in their wings, he could ever quite get to in time. View quote
Thomas Pynchon
I want you to hold this for me, till I ask for it back. It looks like Italo is going to get here before Tamara, and I'm not sure which one. View quote
Thomas Pynchon
If he'd been the type who evolves theories of history for his own amusement, he might have said all political events: wars, governments and uprisings, have the desire to get laid as their roots; because history unfolds according to economic forces and the only reason anybody wants to get rich is so he can get laid steadily, with whoever he chooses. View quote
Thomas Pynchon
What have the watchmen of the world's edge come tonight to look for? Deepening on now, monumental beings stoical, on toward slag, toward ash the colour the night will stabilize at, tonight... what is there grandiose enough to witness? View quote
Thomas Pynchon
Out at the horizon, out near the burnished edge of the world, who are these visitors standing... these robed figures -. View quote
Thomas Pynchon
This ascent will be betrayed to Gravity. But the Rocket engine, the deep cry of combustion that jars the soul, promises escape. The victim, in bondage to falling, rises on a promise, a prophecy, of Escape.... (Thomas Pynchon)
Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. View quote
Thomas Pynchon
Don't jump at an infinite number of possible shapes. There's only one. It is most likely an interface between one order of things and another. View quote
Thomas Pynchon
She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government. View quote
Thomas Pynchon
As spread thighs are to the libertine, flights of migratory birds to the ornithologist, the working part of his tool bit to the production machinist, so was the letter V to young Stencil. View quote
Thomas Pynchon