The Northern powers are more like administrators, who manipulate other people’s history but produce none of their own. They are the stock-jobbers of history, lives are their units of exchange. Lives as they are lived, deaths as they are died, all that is made of flesh, blood, semen, bone, fire, pain, shit, madness, intoxication, visions, everything that has been passing down here forever, is real history.

About This Quote

About Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon was a contemporary American novelist. Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist. Read more on Wikipedia →

Themes

  • History — Lessons from the past and the arc of human civilisation
  • War — Reflections on conflict, peace, and the human cost of war

More quotes by Thomas Pynchon

Related Quotes