Thomas Pynchon: Likeness

“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”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Context: "You." A finger the size of a corncob, an inch from Slothrop's nose.
...
"Look," Slothrop's friend producing a kraft-paper envelope that even in the gloom Slothrop can tell is fat with American Army yellow-seal scrip, "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"
"At this rate, Tamara's gonna get here before tonight," Slothrop interjects in a Groucho Marx voice.
"Don't try to undermine my confidence in you," advises the Large One. "You're the man."

“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.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Context: No, as none of these, but instead a point in space, a point hung precise as the point where burning must end, never launched, never to fall. And what is the specific shape whose center of gravity is the Brennschluss Point? 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. There's a Brennschluss point for every firing site. They still hang up there, all of them, a constellation waiting to have a 13th sign of the Zodiac named for it...

“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”

Thomas Pynchon book V.

Source: V. (1963), Chapter Two, Part II
Context: The rest of the Crew partook of the same lethargy. Raoul wrote for television, keeping carefully in mind, and complaining bitterly about, all the sponsor-fetishes of that industry. Slab painted in sporadic bursts, referring to himself as a Catatonic Expressionist and his work as “the ultimate in non-communication.” Melvin played the guitar and sang liberal folk songs. 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

Soul , Reality , Time

“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."”

Thomas Pynchon

I wrote that in the first few shook-up minutes after hearing the bulletin sandwiched in between Don and Phil Everly and surrounded by all manner of whoops and whistles coming out of an audio signal generator, like you are apt to hear on the provincial radio these days. But I don't think I'd take those words back.
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.
Our souls it leaves to whatever obsolescences, bigotries, theories of education workable and un, parental wisdom or lack of it, happen to get in its more or less Brownian (your phrase) pilgrimage between the cord-cutting ceremony and the time they slide you down the chute into the oven, while the guy on the Wurlitzer plays Aba Daba Honeymoon because you had once told somebody it was the nadir of all American expression; only they didn't know what nadir meant but it must be good because of the vehemence with which you expressed yourself.
Letter to Jules Siegel, published in Cavalier magazine (August 1965); republished in "Pynchon notes 15" and " "The World is at Fault" http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=The_World_is_at_Fault at pynchonwiki.com http://pynchonwiki.com/

World , Game , Support

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

Thomas Pynchon Mason & Dixon

Source: Mason & Dixon (1997), Chapter 74

People , Religion

“What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove's difference and the universe can be on into a whole 'nother song.”

Thomas Pynchon book Inherent Vice

Source: Inherent Vice

Universe

“"Arrh! Stars and Mud, ever conjugate, a Paradox to consider, — one…for the Astronomer-Royal, perhaps?" His current scheme being, to assail Maskelyne's Sanity, by now and then posing to him Questions that will not bear too much cogitating upon, — most lately, Über Bernouillis Brachistochronsprobleme, 1702 by Baron von Boppdörfer ("Mind like a Spanish Blade. Read it at the Risk of your Self-Esteem.") having almost done the Trick.”

Thomas Pynchon Mason & Dixon

Source: Mason & Dixon (1997), Chapter 74

Star , Question , Reading

“She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.”

Thomas Pynchon book The Crying of Lot 49

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

Communication , Understanding , Sense , Time

“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

Secret , Stupidity , World , Way

“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

“Charlie really has this, like, obsessive death wish! Yes! he, he wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty, man, deep parable of consumer capitalism, they won't be happy with anything less than drift-netting us all, chopping us up and stacking us on the shelves of Supermarket Amerika, and subconsciously the horrible thing is, is we want them to do it…”

Thomas Pynchon book Inherent Vice

Source: Inherent Vice (2009), p. 119

Death , Suicide , Loyalty , Happiness

“I apologize if I've interrupted some exceptionally demanding hippie task, like trying to remember where the glue is on the Zig-Zag paper, but it seems we have yet another problem, not unconnected with this fatality of yours for introducing disaster into every life you touch, however glancingly.”

Thomas Pynchon book Inherent Vice

Source: Inherent Vice (2009), p. 203

Life , Problem

“Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45°, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered throughout the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose? Or was it only the mirror world that counted; only a promise of a kind that the inward bow of a nose-bridge or a promontory of extra cartilage at the chin meant a reversal of ill fortune such that the world of the altered would thenceforth run on mirror-time; work and love by mirror-light and be only, till death stopped the heart's ticking (metronome's music) quietly as light ceases to vibrate, an imp's dance under the century's own chandeliers….”

Thomas Pynchon book V.

Source: V. (1963), Chapter Two, Part I

Love , Death , World , Music

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

Thomas Pynchon

Phone call to CNN (5 June 1997)

“Charlie really has this, like, obsessive death wish!”

Thomas Pynchon book Inherent Vice

Yes! he, he wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty, man, deep parable of consumer capitalism, they won't be happy with anything less than drift-netting us all, chopping us up and stacking us on the shelves of Supermarket Amerika, and subconsciously the horrible thing is, is we want them to do it...
Source: Inherent Vice (2009), p. 119

Death

“Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Joy , Feeling , Soul