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Thomas Pynchon
99 quotes
“Why should things be easy to understand?”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Pynchon's response to Jules Siegel about the complexity of V, as quoted in "Who Is Thomas Pynchon... And Why Did He Take Off With My Wife?", Playboy (March 1977)
“Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Phone call to CNN, reported in "Where's Thomas Pynchon?", CNN (June 5, 1997)
“My belief is that "recluse" is a code word generated by journalists... meaning, "doesn't like to talk to reporters.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Phone call to CNN (June 5, 1997)
“I did not write those letters. This has been a hoax that I've had nothing to do with. I'm sorry it's gone on as long as it has.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Phone call to CNN (June 5, 1997), on the rumors that he had written a series of letters to a newspaper using the name Wanda Tinasky
“Here's your quote: "Thomas Pynchon loved this book, almost as much as he loves cameras!" Hey, over here! Have your picture taken with a reclusive author! Today only, we'll throw in a free autograph! But wait, there's more!”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Playing himself (depicted with a paper bag over his head) on The Simpsons, "Diatribe of a Mad Housewife" (January 25, 2004)
“Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneaker and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You're Orthodox? No. Conservative? Young people never are. My parents were Orthodox. They believe, I believe, that whatever your father is, as long as your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish too because we all come from our mother's womb. A long unbroken chain of Jewish mothers going all the way back to Eve.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You know how a boy is. There comes a time for departure, a point where he sees confirmed the suspicion he’d had for some time that his father is not a god, not even a oracle. He sees that he no longer has any right to any such father. So Vheissu becomes a bedtime story or fairly tale after all, and the boy a superior version of his merely human father.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Strangely the tumescence began to subside, the flesh at his neck to pale. Any sovereign or broken yo-yo must feel after a short time lying inert, rolling, falling: suddenly to have its hands it cannot escape. Hands it doesn’t want to escape. Know that the simple clockwork of itself has no more need for symptoms of inutility, lonesomeness, directionlessness, because now it has a path marked out for it over which it has no control. That’s what the feeling would be, if there were such things as animate yo-yos.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dream tonight of peacock tails, Diamond fields and spouter whales. Ills are many, blessings few, But dreams tonight will shelter you.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“History, the proverb says, is made at night. The European civil servant normally sleeps at night. What waits in his IN basket to confront him at nine in the morning is history.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Politics is a kind of engineering isn't it. With people as your raw material.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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, nearing eighty, I keep discovering that damned war has made the world older than I. The world frowns now on youth in a vacuum, it insists youth be turned-to, utilized, exploited. No time for pranks. No more Vheissus.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 thermodynamics going on, man was looked on as a heat engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For a boy not getting any he had more woman problems than anybody he knew.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Run away with me," said Roseman when the coffee came. "Where?" she asked. That shut him up.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, 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: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in the tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was dreaming … about my grandfather. A very old man, at least as old as I am now, 91. I thought, when I was a boy, that he had been 91 all his life. Now I feel as if I have been 91 all my life.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Teamwork," Koteks snarled, "is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It's a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there’s cataclysm.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy. "Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person’s time line sideways till they all coincide.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Write by WASTE. ... The government will open it if you use the other. The dolphins will be mad. Love the dolphins.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whenever I put the headsets on now," he'd continued, "I really do understand what I find there. When those kids sing about 'She loves you,' yeah, well, you know, she does, she's any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, shapes, sizes, distances from death, but she loves. And the 'you' is everybody. And herself.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The illustrations were woodcuts, executed with that crude haste to see the finished product that marks the amateur. True pornography is given us by vastly patient professionals.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Death glided by, shadowless, among the empties on the grass.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall soon it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They are in love. Fuck the war.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home — only the millions of last moments... nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She has turned her face, more than once, to the Outer Radiance and simply seen nothing there. And so each time taken a little more of the Zero into herself. It comes down to courage, at worst an amount of self-deluding that's vanishingly small: he has to admire it, even if he can't accept her glassy wastes, her appeals to a day not of wrath but of final indifference....”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice — guessed and refused to believe — that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the rainbow, and they its children....”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He lies on top of her, sweating, taking great breaths, watching her face turned 3/4 away, not even a profile, but the terrible Face That is No Face, gone too abstract, unreachable: the notch of the eye socket, but never the labile eye, only the anonymous curve of cheek, convexity of mouth, a noseless mask of the Other Order of Being, of Katje's being — the lifeless non-face that is the only face of hers he really knows, or will ever remember.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You." A finger the size of a corncob, an inch from Slothrop's nose. ... "Look," Slothrop's friend producing a kraft-paper envelope that even in the gloom Slothrop can tell is fat with American Army yellow-seal scrip, "I want you to hold this for me, till I ask for it back. It looks like Italo is going to get here before Tamara, and I'm not sure which one" "At this rate, Tamara's gonna get here before tonight," Slothrop interjects in a Groucho Marx voice. "Don't try to undermine my confidence in you," advises the Large One. "You're the man.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tibet is a special case. Tibet was deliberately set aside by the Empire as free and neutral territory, a Switzerland for the spirit where there is no extradition, and Alp-Himalayas to draw the soul upward, and danger rare enough to tolerate.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Proverbs for Paranoids: 1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures. 2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master. 3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers. 4. You hide, they seek. 5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The man's thirst for guilt was insatiable as the desert's for water.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's a Rocket-raising: a festival new to this country. Soon it will come to the folk-attention how close Wernher von Braun's birthday is to the Spring Equinox, and the same German impulse that once rolled flower-boats through the towns and staged mock battles between young Spring and deathwhite old Winter will be erecting strange floral towers out in the clearings and meadows, and the young scientist-surrogate will be going round and round with Gravity or some such buffoon, and the children will be tickled, and laugh....”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Personal density," Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemünde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, "is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth." "Temporal bandwidth," is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "∆ t" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She watches Marvy's face as he pays Monika, watches him in this primal American act, paying, more deeply himself than when coming, or asleep, or maybe even dying.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Non-Masons stay pretty much in the dark about What Goes On, though now and then something jumps out, exposes itself, jumps giggling back again, leaving you with few details but a lot of Awful Suspicions.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Flotsam from his childhood are rising through his attention. He's remembering the skin of an apple, bursting with nebulae, a look into curved reddening space.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Jamf was only a fiction, to help him explain what he felt so terribly, so immediately in his genitals for those rockets each time exploding in the sky... to help him deny what he could not possibly admit: that he might be in love, in sexual love, with his, and his race’s, death.”
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source