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Thomas Pynchon: 268 quotes5 likes

““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 book The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 5, Mucho Maas

“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 Mason & Dixon

Source: Mason & Dixon (1997), Chapter 74

“It can get pretty fascist in here…”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“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

On the rumors that he had written a series of letters to a newspaper using the name Wanda Tinasky, in a phone call to CNN (5 June 1997)

“Merle's all-night illumination prolonged itself into an inescapable glow that began to keep him awake.”

Thomas Pynchon book Against the Day

Source: Against the Day (2006), p. 65

“In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, 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 the tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.”

Thomas Pynchon book The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 1

“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 book The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 5

“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 book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“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 book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“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 book The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 1

“"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 book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

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

Thomas Pynchon book V.

Source: V. (1963), Chapter Nine, Part II, Mondaugen

“The man's thirst for guilt was insatiable as the desert's for water.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“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 book Inherent Vice

Source: Inherent Vice (2009), p. 137

“Write by WASTE. The government will open it if you use the other. The dolphins will be mad. Love the dolphins.”

Thomas Pynchon book The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

“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 book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“It was impossible to get a decent meal, or even snack, anywhere, burned flapjacks and vulcanized steaks being as appetizing as things got. It also quickly became evident — horribly evident — that no one in the city knew how to make coffee, as if there were some sort of stultified consensus, or even city ordinance, about never waking up.”

Thomas Pynchon book Against the Day

Source: Against the Day (2006), p. 66

“Everybody here drove around like a dedicated loser, expecting moment to moment to get into an accident. Doc could relate to this — it was like the beach, where you lived in a climate of unquestioning hippie belief, pretending to trust everybody while always expecting to be sold out”

Thomas Pynchon book Inherent Vice

but he didn't have to enjoy that either, especially.
Source: Inherent Vice (2009), p. 225

“Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)