Thomas Pynchon Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• I mean what they and their hired psychiatrists call delusional systems. Needless to say, ‘delusions’ are always officially defined. We do not have to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of expediency. It’s the system that matters. How the data arrange themselves inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Real, Fall, Mean

  7 Copy quote

• Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Despair, Relevance

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “The Crying of Lot 49”, p.54, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Believe, Moving

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “Gravity's Rainbow”, p.165, Penguin

  18 Copy quote

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

  Thomas Pynchon

  Stars, Hands, Giving

  5 Copy quote

• Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs--what were the chances of finding anyone else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it?

  Thomas Pynchon

  Government, World, Narrative

  4 Copy quote

• In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on as a heat engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Men, Nuclear, Neutrons

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “V.”, p.187, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

• Some typewriters in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4 could have ever hoped to.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Typewriters, Littles, Pentagon

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “Gravity's Rainbow”, p.354, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• Danger's over, Banana Breakfast is saved.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Breakfast, Bananas, Danger

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “Gravity's Rainbow”, p.10, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

• We are here among you as seekers of refuge from our present-your future-a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty-the end of the capitalistic experiment. Once we came to understand the simpl...truth that earth's resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the whole capitalistic illusion fell to pieces. Those of us who spoke this truth were denounced as heretics, as enemies of the prevailing economic faith. Like religious Dissenters of an earlier day.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Running, Religious, Enemy

  4 Copy quote

• The anarchist is dressed all in black. In the dark you can only see his eyes. It dates from the 1930's. Porky Pig is a little boy. The children told me that he has a nephew now, Cicero. Do you remember, during the war, when Porky worked in a defense plant? He and Bugs Bunny. That was a good one too.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Children, War, Eye

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “The Crying of Lot 49”, p.43, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• All variables are independent.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Independent, Variables

  4 Copy quote

• For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Sadness, Space, Forever

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “The Crying of Lot 49”, p.9, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Taken, Waiting, Hey

  "Fictional character: Thomas Pynchon". TV Series "The Simpsons" ("Diatribe of a Mad Housewife", 2004), (1989- ).

  7 Copy quote

• I dream that I have found us both again, With spring so many strangers' lives away, And we, so free, Out walking by the sea, With someone else's paper words to say.... They took us at the gates of green return, Too lost by then to stop, and ask them why- Do children meet again? Does any trace remain, Along the superhighways of July?

  Thomas Pynchon

  Dream, Children, Spring

  7 Copy quote

• But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Demon, Maxwell, Communicate

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “The Crying of Lot 49”, p.76, Penguin

  7 Copy quote

• What sort of an age is this where a man becomes one's enemy only when his back is turned?

  Thomas Pynchon

  Men, Enemy, Age

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “V.”, p.105, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Girl, Numbers, Towers

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “The Crying of Lot 49”, p.9, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• My mother is the war,' declares Roger Mexico, leaning over to open the door.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Mother, War, Doors

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “Gravity's Rainbow”, p.33, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• "You are so close." "To whom? Margravine, not even to himself. This place, this island: all his life he's done nothing but hop from island to island. Is that a reason? Does there have to be a reason? Shall he tell you: he works for no Whitehall, non conceivable unless, ha, ha, the network of white halls in his own brain: these featureless corridors he keeps swept and correct for occasional visiting agents."

  Thomas Pynchon

  Islands, White, Brain

  "V". Book by Thomas Pynchon, 1961.

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Zero, Arbitrary, Lines

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “The Crying of Lot 49”, p.67, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

• Liebig himself seems to have occupied the role of a gate, or sorting-demon, such as his younger contemporary Clerk Maxwell once proposed, helping to concentrate energy into one favored room of the Creation at the expense of everything else.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Clerks, Energy, Roles

  7 Copy quote

• He was visited on a lunar basis by these great unspecific waves of horniness, whereby all women within a certain age group and figure envelope became immediately and impossibly desirable. He emerged from these spells with eyeballs still oscillating and a wish that his neck could rotate through the full 360 degrees.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Wish, Age, Groups

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “V.”, p.22, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

• But a few choosing to venture deeper into the painful corridors of their affliction, found after a while that they could now grind and polish ever more exotic surfaces, hyperboloidial and even stranger, eventually including what we must term ‘imaginary’ shapes (which some preferred to term invisible).

  Thomas Pynchon

  Exotic, Affliction, Shapes

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Grief, Support, Faults

  Letter to Jules Siegel, Cavalier magazine, August 1965.

  4 Copy quote

• Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Color, Gone Away, Dresses

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “The Crying of Lot 49”, p.76, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

Page 4 of 5

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin