1. Top Famous Quotes
    2. /
  2. Thomas Pynchon Quotes

Top Thomas Pynchon Quotes

Browse top 267 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Thomas Pynchon.

Favorite Thomas Pynchon Quotes

1. "the hole left by the moon's tearing-free and monument to her exile;" ~ Thomas Pynchon
2. "Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the colour of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which - though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off - the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations... so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects..." ~ Thomas Pynchon
3. "Indoors, the evening gets you'd say festive, with Maxine riding Horst for the better part of an hour, not that it's anybody's business of course, and coming a number of times, at last fiercely in sync with Horst, not long after which, owing to some extrasensory cue from the television, whose mute feature has been engaged, they surface from their post-orgy daze in time to witness Derek Jeter's clutch tenth-inning homer and another trademark Yankee win. "Yes!" Horst beginning to scream in delighted disbelief. "And it better be Keanu Reeves in the biopic!" ~ Thomas Pynchon
4. "She sank with an enormous sigh that carried all rigidity like a mythical fluid from her, down next to him; so weak she couldn't help him undress her; it took him 20 minutes, rolling, arranging her this way and that, as if she thought, he were some scaled-up, short-haired, poker-faced little girl with a Barbie doll. She may have fallen asleep once or twice. She awoke at last to find herself getting laid; she'd come in on a sexual crescendo in progress, like a cut to a scene where the camera's already moving. Outside a fugue of guitars had begun, and she counted each electronic voice as it came in, till she reached six or so and recalled only three of the Paranoids played guitars; so others must be plugging in." ~ Thomas Pynchon
5. "Why is it that we honor the Great Thieves of Whitehall, for Acts that in Whitechapel would merit hanging? Why admire one sort of Thief, and despise the other? I suggest, 'tis because of the Scale of the Crime.--What we of the Mobility love to watch, is any of the Great Motrices, Greed, Lust, Revenge, taken out of all measure, brought quite past the scale of the ev'ryday world, approaching what we always knew were the true Dimensions of Desire. Let Antony lose the world for Cleopatra, to be sure,--not Dick his Day's Wages, at the Tavern." ~ Thomas Pynchon
6. "Ten million dead. Gas. Passchendaele. Let that be now a large figure, now a chemical formula, now an historical account. But dear lord, not the Nameless Horror, the sudden prodigy sprung on a world unaware. We all saw it. There was no innovation, no special breach of nature, or suspension of familiar principles. If it came as any surprise to the public then their own blindness is the Great Tragedy, hardly the war itself." ~ Thomas Pynchon
7. "Tito snored away on the other bed. Out there, all around them to the last fringes of occupancy, were Toobfreex at play in the video universe, the tropic isle, the Long Branch Saloon, the Starship Enterprise, Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with invisible audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball highlights, Vietnam footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and midnight jokes, and talking celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle, and Arnold the pig, and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn't find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness…" ~ Thomas Pynchon
8. "Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia. Given to sentimental impulses, he thought he'd look in on the Sailor's Grave, his old tin can's tavern on East Main Street." ~ Thomas Pynchon
9. "A screaming comes across the sky." ~ Thomas Pynchon
10. "Now single up all lines!" ~ Thomas Pynchon
11. "Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?" ~ Thomas Pynchon
12. "Never know when a gal might need a laser." ~ Thomas Pynchon
13. "It went on for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day." ~ Thomas Pynchon
14. "Times of great idealism carry equal chances for greater corruptibility." ~ Thomas Pynchon
15. "What? -- RICHARD M NIXON" ~ Thomas Pynchon
16. "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 than was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe or outside, lost." ~ Thomas Pynchon
17. "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
18. "This spiritualist, this statistician, what are you anyway?" ~ Thomas Pynchon
19. "As the day light left the city that night, the streetlamps were not up to anything like their usual candle-power. It was difficult to make anything out clearly. Ordinary social restraints were apt to be defective or not there at all. The screaming that went on all night, ignored as background murmur during the day, now, absent the clamor of street traffic, had taken on urgency and despair – a chorale of pain just about to pass from its realm of the invisible into something that might actually have to be dealt with. Figures which late at night appeared only in levels of grey were now seen to possess color, not the fashionable shades of daytime but blood reds, morgue yellows, and poison greens." ~ Thomas Pynchon
20. "Yeah, but nowadays it's all you see anymore is cops, the tube is saturated with fucking cop shows, just being regular guys, only tryin to do their job, folks, no more threat to nobody's freedom than some dad in a sitcom. Right. Get the viewer population so cop-happy they're beginning to be run in. Good-bye Johnny Staccato, welcome and while you're at it please kick my door down, Steve McGarrett." ~ Thomas Pynchon
21. "... as long as American life was something to be escaped from, the cartel would always be assured a bottomless pool of new customers." ~ Thomas Pynchon
22. "She couldn't stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears. They seemed to know what she wanted, even if she didn't." ~ Thomas Pynchon
23. "Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for, and though it kills me to say it, it's what rock and roll is becoming - just another way to claim our attention, so that beautiful certainty we had starts to fade, and after a while they have us convinced all over again that we really are going to die. And they've got us again." ~ Thomas Pynchon
24. "If he is going into management, he writes. If he is an engineer or architect why he paints or sculpts. He will straddle the line, aware up to the point of knowing he is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why there should ever be a line, or even if there is a line at all." ~ Thomas Pynchon
25. "What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not the still photograph of finished character but the movie, the soul in flux." ~ Thomas Pynchon
26. "Can't say it often enough - change your hair, change your life." ~ Thomas Pynchon
27. "Which is why Slothrop now observes his coalition with hopes for success and hopes for disaster about equally high (and no, that doesn't cancel out to apathy—it makes a loud dissonance that dovetails inside you sharp as knives). It does annoy him that he can be so divided, so perfectly unable to come down on one side or another. Those whom the old Puritan sermons denounced as "the glozing neuters of the world" have no easy road to haul down, Wear-the-Pantsers, just cause you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there! Energy inside is just as real, just as binding and inescapable, as energy that shows. When's the last time you felt intensely lukewarm? eh? Glozing neuters are just as human as heroes and villains. In many ways they have the most grief to put up with, don't they?" ~ Thomas Pynchon
28. "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
29. "Damn you all. You have no idea what you're heading into. This world you take to be 'the' world will die, and descend into Hell, and all history after that will belong properly to the history of Hell." ~ Thomas Pynchon
30. "Though it is not often that death is so clearly told to fuck off." ~ Thomas Pynchon
31. "But with a sigh he had released her hand, while she was so lost in the fantasy that she hadn't felt it go away, as if he'd known the best moment to let go." ~ Thomas Pynchon
32. "There are two more turds, smaller ones, and when he has eaten these, residual shit to lick out of her anus. He prays that she'll let him drop the cape over himself, to be allowed, in the silk-lined darkness, to stay a while longer with his submissive tongue straining upward into her asshole. But she moves away. The fur evaporates from his hands. She orders him to masturbate for her. She has watched Captain Blicero with Gottfried, and has learned the proper style." ~ Thomas Pynchon
33. "In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where's his basis for comparing?" ~ Thomas Pynchon
34. "There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present as his own assembley--perhaps heavily paranoid voices whisper, 'his time's assembley'--and there ought to be a punchline to it, but there isn't. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead and being scattered. His cards have been laid down, Celtic style, in the order suggested by Mr. A.E. Waite, laid out and read, but they are the cards of a tanker and feeb: they point only to a long and scuffling future, to mediocrity...-to no clear happiness or redeeming cataclysm." ~ Thomas Pynchon
35. "Pointsman is finding it much easier to of late to slip into a l'etat c'est moi frame of mind--who else is doing anything?" ~ Thomas Pynchon
36. "That, indeed, the Home Front is something of a fiction and lie, designed, not too subtly, to draw them apart, to subvert love in favor of work, abstraction, required pain, bitter death." ~ Thomas Pynchon
37. "Down the toilet, lookit me, What a silly thing ta do!Hope nobody takes a pee,Yippy dippy dippy doo . . ." ~ Thomas Pynchon
38. "Everybody out on the sidewalk is a pedestrian Mercedes, wallowing in entitlement—colliding, snarling, shoving ahead without even the hollow-to-begin-with local euphemism "Excuse me." ~ Thomas Pynchon
39. "I haven't sold my soul yet – well, maybe a couple bars of rhythm and blues here and there." ~ Thomas Pynchon
40. "Dream tonight of peacock tails,Diamond fields and spouter whales.Ills are many, blessings few,But dreams tonight will shelter you.Let the vampire's creaking wingHide the stars while banshees sing;Let the ghouls gorge all night long;Dreams will keep you safe and strong.Skeletons with poison teeth,Risen from the world beneath,Ogre, troll, and loup-garou,Bloody wraith who looks like you,Shadow on the window shade,Harpies in a midnight raid,Goblins seeking tender prey,Dreams will chase them all away.Dreams are like a magic cloakWoven by the fairy folk,Covering from top to toe,Keeping you from winds and woe.And should the Angel come this nightTo fetch your soul away from light,Cross yourself, and face the wall:Dreams will help you not at all." ~ Thomas Pynchon
41. "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
42. "Nothing he had brought to it of his nearest comparison, Raby with its thatch'd and benevolent romance of serfdom, had at all prepar'd him for the iron Criminality of the Cape,-- the publick Executions and Whippings, the open'd flesh, the welling blood, the beefy contented faces of those whites.... Yet is Dixon certain, as certain as the lightness he feels now, lightness premonitory of Flying, that far worse happen'd here, to these poor People, as the blood flew and the Children cried,-- that at the end no one understood what they said as they died." ~ Thomas Pynchon
43. "His five feet three rested angular on the folding chair, a body small, well-wrought and somehow precious, as if it were the forgotten creation of any goldsmith—even Cellini—shrouded now in dark serge and waiting to be put up for auction." ~ Thomas Pynchon
44. "...so claim'd are the Surveyors in their contra-solar Return by Might-it-bes, and If-it-weres, - not to mention What-was-thats." ~ Thomas Pynchon
45. "There's a poetry to it, engineer's poetry…it suggests Haverie—average, you know—certainly you have two lobes, don't you, symmetrical about the rocket's intended azimuth…hauen, too-smashing someone with a hoe or a club…" off on a voyage of his own here, smiling at no one in particular, bringing in the popular wartime expression ab-hauen, quarterstaff technique, peasant humor, phallic comedy dating back to the ancient Greeks…Slothrop's first impulse is to get back to what that Plas is into, but something about the man, despite obvious membership in the plot, keeps him listening…an innocence, maybe a try at being friendly in the only way he has available, sharing what engages and runs him, a love for the Word." ~ Thomas Pynchon
46. "When the earliest Vikings started moving into the northern oceans, there's one story about finding this huge fuckin opening at the top of the world, this deep whirlpool that'd take you down and in, like a black hole, no way to escape. These days you look at the surface Web, all that yakking, all the goods for sale, the spammers and spielers and idle fingers, all in the same desperate scramble they like to call an economy. Meantime, down here, sooner or later someplace deep, there has to be a horizon between coded and codeless. An abyss.""That's what you're looking for?""Some of us are." Avatars do not do wistful, but Maxine catches something. "Others are trying to avoid it. Depends what you're into." ~ Thomas Pynchon
47. "But then last September the rockets came. Them fucking rockets. You couldn't adjust to the bastards." ~ Thomas Pynchon
48. "Making Final Fantasy X, anyway, look like an Etch A Sketch." ~ Thomas Pynchon
49. "You remember those twin statues of the Buddha that I told you about? Carved out of a mountain in Afghanistan, that got dynamited by the Taliban back in the spring? Notice anything familiar?""Twin Buddhas, twin towers, interesting coincidence, so what.""The Trade Center towers were religious too. They stood for what this country worships above everything else, the market, always the holy fucking market.""A religious beef, you're saying?""It's not a religion? These are people who believe the Invisible Hand of the Market runs everything. They fight holy wars against competing religions like Marxism. Against all evidence that the world is finite, this blind faith that resources will never run out, profits will go on increasing forever, just like the world's populations--more cheap labor, more addicted consumers." ~ Thomas Pynchon
50. "The past, hey no shit, it's an open invitation to wine abuse." ~ Thomas Pynchon
First«123456»Last

Thomas Pynchon Quotes Pictures

Thomas Pynchon Quotes
Thomas Pynchon Quotes
Thomas Pynchon Quotes

Today's Quote

A man who graduated high in his class at Yale Law School and made partnership in a top law firm would be celebrated. A man who invested wisely would be admired, but a woman who accomplishes this is treated with suspicion."
Author: Barbra Streisand

What Did Thomas Pynchon Talk About?

Here
Ear
Wit
Thin
Con
Hey
Ten
Hen
End
Per
Ring
She
King
Lit
Sin
Low
Able
Win
Old
Lie
Ally
Use
Tan
Less
Self
Thou
Act
Owe
Body
Pen
Los
Era
Son
Bee
May
Side
Again
Air
Night
Late
Sing
Each
Hit
Light
Ape
Ways
Off
Away
Line
Mean

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Copyright © 2023 Top Famous Quotes. All Rights Reserved. | New Quotes | Topic List | Author List | Privacy Policy | About Us | Contact Us |