Quotes by Thomas Pynchon

“Politics is a kind of engineering isn't it. With people as your raw material.”

“We simply grow up. In Florence, at age fifty-four, I was a brash youth. Had I known the Duse was there her poet chap might have found dangerous competition, ha-ha. The only trouble is that now, nea...”

“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 thermodynami...”

“Right and left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouse of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets manipulated by...”

“For a boy not getting any he had more woman problems than anybody he knew.”

“A number of frail girls... prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: fo...”

“Run away with me, said Roseman when the coffee came. Where? she asked. That shut him up.”

“She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the...”

“In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled Bordando el Manto Terrestre, were a ...”

“There'd been no escape. What did she so desire to escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego onl...”

“You one of those right wing nut outfits? inquired the diplomatic Metzger. Fallopian twinkled. They accuse us of being paranoids. They? inquired Metzger, twinkling also. Us? asked Oedipa.”

“You don’t understand, getting mad. You guys, you’re like Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words. You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback ...”