Quotes by Thomas Pynchon

“The Doper's DreamLast night I dreamed I was plugged right inTo a bubblin' hookah so high,When all of a sudden some Arab jinniJump up just a-winkin' his eye.'I'm here to obey all your wishes,' he to...”

“There are places we fear, places we dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, sometimes, too late.”

“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...”

“Could he have been the fork in the road American never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropite heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper? Might ther...”

“Nobody wanted to hear about all the Preterite, the many God passes over when he chooses a few for salvation. William argued holiness for these "second Sheep," without whom there'd be no elect. You ...”

“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 chan...”

“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.”

“One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living... and with each one, he thinks ...”

“It had been dark at the beach for hours, he hadn't been smoking much and it wasn't headlights but before she turned away, he could swear he saw light falling on her face, the orange light just aft...”

“Youre chicken, she told herself, snapping her seat belt. This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl.”

“The silences here are retreats of sound, like the retreat of the surf before a tidal wave: sound draining away, down slopes of acoustic passage, to gather, someplace else, to a great surge of noise.”

“You felt she'd done a thousand secret things to her eyes. They needed no haze of cigarette smoke to look at you out of sexy and fathomless, but carried their own along with them. New York must have...”

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

“The grandeur of space, dig it. Zillions of stars, each one gets its own pixel.Awesome.Maybe, but its codes all it is.”

“One glance at any government budget anywhere in the world tells the storythe money is always in place, already allocated, the motive everywhere is fear, the more immediate the fear, the higher the ...”

“Why should things be easy to understand?”

“I don't do lunch. Corrupt artifact of late capitalism. Breakfast maybe?”

“It's true,' Vanya now, 'look at the forms of capitalist expression. Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of ki...”

“Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. I...”

“This generation - it's almost a religious thing now. The millennium, the end days, no need to be responsible anymore to the future. A burden has been lifted from them. The Baby Jesus is managing th...”