Top 200 Thomas Pynchon Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Thomas Pynchon

2. “Why should things be easy to understand?”

— Thomas Pynchon

3. “Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.”

— Thomas Pynchon

4. “Danger’s over, Banana Breakfast is saved.”

— Thomas Pynchon

5. “Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.”

— Thomas Pynchon

6. “If there is something comforting – religious, if you want – about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”

— Thomas Pynchon

7. “You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.”

— Thomas Pynchon

8. “Can’t say it often enough – change your hair, change your life.”

— Thomas Pynchon

9. “Shall I project a world?”

— Thomas Pynchon

10. “A screaming comes across the sky.”

— Thomas Pynchon

11. “Our history is an aggregate of last moments.”

— Thomas Pynchon

12. “What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing? – Gravity’s Rainbow, V699.”

— Thomas Pynchon

13. “Time is never wasted if you remember to bring along something to read.”

— Thomas Pynchon

14. “Not me, paranoia’s the garlic in life’s kitchen, right, you can never have too much.”

— Thomas Pynchon

15. “The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.”

— Thomas Pynchon

16. “Doc was into his own apprenticeship as a skip tracer, and each, gradually locating a different karmic thermal above the megalopolis, had watched the other glide away into a different fate.”

— Thomas Pynchon

17. “Ills are many, blessings few, but dreams tonight will shelter you.”

— Thomas Pynchon

18. “Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.”

— Thomas Pynchon

19. “Length is usually intensity. Not time.”

— Thomas Pynchon

20. “Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself.”

— Thomas Pynchon

21. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do.”

— Thomas Pynchon

22. “An assistant closed the heavy door on the lobby windows and the sun. She heard a lock snap shut; the sound echoed a moment. Passerine spread his arms in a gesture that seemed to belong to the priesthood of some remote culture; perhaps to a descending angel. The auctioneer cleared his throat. Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of lot 49.”

— Thomas Pynchon

23. “Keep cool but care.”

— Thomas Pynchon

24. “Information. What’s wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?”

— Thomas Pynchon

25. “Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.”

— Thomas Pynchon

26. “Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.”

— Thomas Pynchon

27. “Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work.”

— Thomas Pynchon

28. “What, I should only trust good people? Man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense.”

— Thomas Pynchon

29. “She thougt of sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west.”

— Thomas Pynchon

30. “What North Europe thinks of as its history is actually quite provincial and of limited interest. Different sorts of Christian killing each other, and that’s about it.”

— Thomas Pynchon

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

— Thomas Pynchon

32. “What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove’s difference and the universe can be on into a whole ’nother song.”

— Thomas Pynchon

33. “Like so many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts – census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.”

— Thomas Pynchon

34. “Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together.”

— Thomas Pynchon

35. “What was “walking on water,” if it wasn’t Bible talk for surfing?”

— Thomas Pynchon

36. “Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.”

— Thomas Pynchon

37. “It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.”

— Thomas Pynchon

38. “Perhaps its familiarity rendered it temporarily invisible to you.”

— Thomas Pynchon

39. “Then again, it’s the whole Reagan program, isn’t it – dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity –.”

— Thomas Pynchon

40. “All variables are independent.”

— Thomas Pynchon

41. “Death is a debt to nature due, Which I have paid, and so must you.”

— Thomas Pynchon

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

— Thomas Pynchon

43. “The reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, and sometimes other orifices also.”

— Thomas Pynchon

44. “Life’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.”

— Thomas Pynchon

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

— Thomas Pynchon

46. “A woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.”

— Thomas Pynchon

47. “If the world offered nothing, nowhere to support or make bearable whatever her private grief was, then it is that world, and not she, that is at fault.”

— Thomas Pynchon

48. “If you look from the side at a planet swinging around in its orbit, split the sun with a mirror and imagine a string, it all looks like a yo-yo. The point furthest from the sun is called aphelion. The point furthest from the yo-yo hand is called, by analogy, apocheir.”

— Thomas Pynchon

49. “But with a sigh he had released her hand, while she was so lost in the fantasy that she hadn’t felt it go away, as if he’d known the best moment to let go.”

— Thomas Pynchon

50. “Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.”

— Thomas Pynchon