Thomas Pynchon > Quotes

“There had hung the sense of buffering, insulation, she had noticed the absence of an intensity, as if watching a movie, just perceptibly out of focus, that the projectionist refused to fix. And had also gently conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret, looking for somebody to say hey, let down your hair.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“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, Gravity’s Rainbow

“the only way clear of the cool/crazy flipflop was obviously slow, frustrating and hard work. Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care. He might have known, if he'd used any common sense. It didn't come as a revelation, only something he'd as soon not've admitted.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“The Doper's Dream

Last night I dreamed I was plugged right in
To a bubblin' hookah so high,
When all of a sudden some Arab jinni
Jump up just a-winkin' his eye.
'I'm here to obey all your wishes,' he told me.
As for words I was trying to grope.
'Good buddy,' I cried, 'you could surely oblige me
By turning me on to some dope!'
With a bigfat smile he took ahold of my hand,
And we flew down the sky in a flash,
And the first thing I saw in the land where he took me
Was a whole solid mountain of hash!
All the trees was a-bloomin' with pink 'n' purple pills,
Whur the Romilar River flowed by,
To the magic mushrooms as wild as a rainbow,
So pretty that I wanted to cry.
All the girls come to greet us, so sweet in slow motion,
Mourning glories woven into their hair,
Bringin' great big handfuls of snowy cocaine,
All their dope they were eager to share.
We we dallied for days, just a-ballin' and smokin',
In the flowering Panama Red,
Just piggin' on peyote and nutmeg tea,
And those brownies so kind to your head.
Now I could've passed that good time forever,
And I really was fixing to stay,
But you know that jinni turned out, t'be a narco man,
And he busted me right whur I lay.
And he took me back to a cold, cold world
'N' now m'prison's whurever I be...
And I dream of the days back in Doperland
And I wonder, will I ever go free?”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private. Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“The magic in these Masonic rituals is very, very old. And way back in those days, it worked. As time went on, and it started being used for spectacle, to consolidate what were only secular appearances of power, it began to lose its zip. But the words, moves, and machinery have been more or less faithfully carried down over the millennia, through the grim rationalizing of the World, and so the magic is still there, though latent, needing only to touch the right sensitive head to reassert itself.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“To those of us who survived [...], it also means that we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Holy shit.” This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19th-century wilderness sunset, a few of which got set down, approximated, on canvas, landscapes of the American West by artists nobody ever heard of, when the land was still free and the eye innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct. Here it thunders now over the Mediterranean, high and lonely, this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer that can be found anywhere today, a purity begging to be polluted…of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul?”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“It was as if she had just discovered the irreversible process. It astonished her to think that so much could be lost, even the quantity of hallucination belonging just to the sailor that the world would bear no further trace of. She knew, because she had held him, that he suffered DT’s. Behind the initials was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind’s plowshare. The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost. Oedipa did not know where she was. Trembling, unfurrowed, she slipped sidewise, screeching back across grooves of years, to hear again the earnest, high voice of her second or third collegiate love Ray Glozing bitching among “uhs” and the syncopated tonguing of a cavity, about his freshman calculus; “dt,” God help this old tattooed man, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate; where velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at its most quick. She knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other man had seen if only because there was that high magic to low puns, because DT’s must give access to dt’s of spectra beyond the known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright. But nothing she knew of would preserve them, or him.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“consider," replies the geomancer, "--adam and eve ate fruit from a tree, and were enlighten'd. the buddha sat beneath a tree, and he was enlighten'd. newton, also sitting beneath a tree, was hit by a falling apple,--and he was enlighten'd. a quick overview would suggest trees produce enlightenment. trees are not the problem. the forest is not an agent of darkness. but it may be your visto is.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

“Remember, God didn't say, 'I'm gonna make light now,' he said, 'Let there be light.' His first act was to allow light in to what had been Nothing. Like God, you also have to always work with the light, make it do only what you want it to do.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

“If there is any political moral to be found in this world,” Stencil once wrote in his journal, “it is that we carry on the business of this century with an intolerable double vision. Right and Left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouses of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets by manipulated mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future.
“What of the real present, the men-of-no-politics, the once-respectable Golden Mean? Obsolete; in any case, lost sight of. In a West of such extremes we can expect, at the very least, a highly ‘alienated’ populace within not many more years.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“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, V.

“Our product is still totally DeepArcher?”
“Which is…”
“Like ‘departure’, only you pronounce it DeepArcher?”
“Zen thing,” Maxine guesses.
“Weed thing.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

“Whenever I put the headset on now," he'd continued, "I really do understand what I find there. When those kids sing about 'She loves you,' yeah well, you know, she does, she's any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the 'you' is everybody. And herself. Oedipa, the human voice, you know, it's a flipping miracle." His eyes brimming, reflecting the color of beer.
"Baby," she said, helpless, knowing of nothing she could do for this, and afraid for him.
He put a little clear plastic bottle on the table between them. She stared at the pills in it, and then understood. "That's LSD?”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“Street cred. Anybody who got in before ’97 is considered OK – from ’97 to 2000 it can go either way, maybe they’re not not always cool, but usually they’re not quite the kind of full-service dickhead you’re seeing in the business now.”
“He’s considered cool?”
“No, he’s a dickhead, but one of the early ones. A pioneer dickhead.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

“Some of us are Outlaws, and some Trespassers upon the very World.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar “Δt” considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now—what you’re doing here,”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“A market need no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself-its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened-that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable...”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“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?”
― Thomas Pynchon, Vineland

“Men had it so simple. When it wasn't about Sticking It In, it was about Having The Gun, a variation that allowed them to Stick It In from a distance.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Vineland

“San Narciso lay further south, near L.A. Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts—census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“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, Gravity’s Rainbow

“...film and calculus, both pornographies of flight.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“I haven’t sold my soul yet—well, maybe a couple bars of rhythm and blues here and there,”
― Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

“We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“Japanese staff who claim not to know a word of English beyond “awesome” and “sucks”, which for a vast range of human endeavour, actually, is more than enough…”
― Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

“Not the first time Doc had run into girl-of-his-dreams unavailability.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

“Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“How do you feel about this terrible thing?"
"Terrible," said Oedipa.
"Wonderful!”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49