Thomas Pynchon Quotes

"Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no "moments of truth." It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which thenselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one's own unanswered."

For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.

She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as ‘pretty’… but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him.

I went to the zoo once and saw this thing they call an anteater. That was quite enough for me.

Though it is not often that death is so clearly told to fuck off.

Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.

Let the peace of this day be here tomorrow when I wake up.

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?

So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.

There is a theory going around that the U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the group known as the Illuminati. It is difficult to look for long at the strange single eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the story, a little. Too many anarchists in 19th-century Europe — Bakunin, Proudhon, Salverio Friscia — were Masons for it to be pure chance. Lovers of global conspiracy, not all of them Catholic, can count on the Masons for a few good shivers and voids when all else fails.

He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.

To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.

Questions arose. Like, what in the fuck was going on here, basically.

The object of life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that, however it finds you, it finds you under very weird circumstances.

This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl.