Thomas Pynchon Quotes - Page 4

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.

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

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...

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

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?

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.

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

Danger's over, Banana Breakfast is saved.

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.

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.

All variables are independent.

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.

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!

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?

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

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

[Oedipa Maas] awoke at last to find herself getting laid.

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

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.

Our history is an aggregate of last moments

She thougt of sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west.

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.

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.

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.

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).