Quotes from book
Gravity's Rainbow

Name: Gravity's Rainbow
Author: Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon

Gravity's Rainbow is a 1973 novel by American writer Thomas Pynchon.

“Once they have you asking the wrong questions. They don't have to worry about the answers.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Variant: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
Source: Gravity's Rainbow

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

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“There is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Source: Gravity's Rainbow

“What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“Let the peace of this day be here tomorrow when I wake up.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Source: Gravity's Rainbow

“Danger's over, Banana Breakfast is saved.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Source: Gravity's Rainbow

“It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Source: Gravity's Rainbow

“If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Source: Gravity's Rainbow

“There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Source: Gravity's Rainbow

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

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Source: Gravity's Rainbow

“All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Source: Gravity's Rainbow

“The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Source: Gravity's Rainbow

“Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Source: Gravity's Rainbow

“The object of life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that, however it finds you, it finds you under very weird circumstances.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Source: Gravity's Rainbow

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

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

First lines
Source: Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“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 book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“Tibet is a special case. Tibet was deliberately set aside by the Empire as free and neutral territory, a Switzerland for the spirit where there is no extradition, and Alp-Himalayas to draw the soul upward, and danger rare enough to tolerate.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“A million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“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 book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“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 book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Similar authors

Thomas Pynchon134

American novelist 1937

Christopher Morley30

American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet None

F. Scott Fitzgerald411

American novelist and screenwriter None

Sinclair Lewis136

American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright None

Henri Barbusse197

French novelist None

Vladimir Nabokov193

Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor None

Erich Maria Remarque63

German novelist None

John Galsworthy48

English novelist and playwright None

João Guimarães Rosa1

Brazilian novelist None

Marcel Proust41

French novelist, critic, and essayist None