Thomas Pynchon Quotes

They're in love. Fuck the war.

Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.

It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.

Shit, money, and the World, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country's fate. But they did not prosper... about all they did was persist

Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.

As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.

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?

It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus.

If patterns of ones and zeroes were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?

They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.

Why is your equation only for angels, Roger? Why can't we do something, down here? Couldn't there be an equation for us too, something to help us find a safer place?'
'Why am I surrounded,' his usual understanding self today, 'by statistical illiterates? There's no way, love, not as long as the mean density of strikes is constant.

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

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out.

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.

Can't say it often enough - change your hair, change your life.

These times are unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one

I haven’t sold my soul yet – well, maybe a couple bars of rhythm and blues here and there.