Quotes by Thomas Pynchon

“Yep, and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, ab...”

“The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.”

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”

“Sometimes, down in the subway, a train Maxine's riding on will slowly be overtaken by a local or an express on the other track, and in the darkness of the tunnel, as the windows of the other train ...”

“Only the framing material," Lucas demurely, "obvious influences, Neo-Tokyo from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metal Gear Solid by Hideo Kojima, or as he's known in my crib, God.”

“Meantime the Newspaper of Record goes around in a little pleated skirt shaking pompoms, leaping in the air with an idiot grin if so much as a cement mixer passes by.”

“Displaced Persons SongIf you see a train this evening,Far away, against the sky,Lie down in your woolen blanket,Sleep and let the train go by.Trains have called us, every midnight,From a thousand m...”

“The film libraries on some of these channels." Elmina said. "I swear. There was one on last night. I couldn't sleep. After I saw, it, I was afraid ro sleep. Have you seen Black Narcissus, 1947?"Edd...”

“They have lied to us. They can't keep us from dying, so They lie to us about death. A cooperative structure of lies. What have they ever given us in return for the trust, the love--They actually sa...”

“What I mean is something like a closed circuit. Everybody on the same frequency. And after a while you forget about the rest of the spectrum and start believing that this is the only frequency that...”

“These times are unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one”

“She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity?”

“And one cried wee, wee, wee, all the way—" Jessica breaking down in a giggle as he reaches for the spot along her sweatered flank he knows she can't bear to be tickled in. She hunches, squirming, o...”

“But as we all know, rock ‘n’ roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever.”

“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.”

“As if somehow irony,” she recaps for Maxine, “as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious — weaken...”

“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.”

“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...”

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