Top 200 Thomas Pynchon Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “New York as a character in a mystery would not be the detective, would not be the murderer. It would be the enigmatic suspect who knows the real story but isn’t going to tell it. – DONALD E. WESTLAKE.”

— Thomas Pynchon

52. “The Stars are so close you won’t need a Telescope.” “The Fish jump into your Arms. The Indians know Magick.” “We’ll go there. We’ll live there.” “We’ll fish there. And you too.”

— Thomas Pynchon

53. “Murphy’s Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel’s Theorem...”

— Thomas Pynchon

54. “Chotto, Kenichiro! Dozo, motto panukeiku.”

— Thomas Pynchon

55. “It’s true,′ Vanya now, ‘look at the forms of capitalist expression. Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of killing, and pornographies of deduction – ahh, that sigh when we guess the murderer – all these novels, these films and songs they lull us with, they’re approaches more comfortable and less so, to that Absolute Comfort.’ A pause to allow Rudi a quick and sour grin. ‘The self-induced orgasm.”

— Thomas Pynchon

56. “There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.”

— Thomas Pynchon

57. “It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.”

— Thomas Pynchon

58. “Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.”

— Thomas Pynchon

59. “A pneumatic toy frog hops onto a lily pad, trembling. Beneath the surface, lies terror.”

— Thomas Pynchon

60. “For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross.”

— Thomas Pynchon

61. “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”

— Thomas Pynchon

62. “Oh, this beer here is cold, cold and hop-bitter, no point coming up for air, gulp, till it’s all – hahhhh.”

— Thomas Pynchon

63. “No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into –.”

— Thomas Pynchon

64. “There is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.”

— Thomas Pynchon

65. “For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.”

— Thomas Pynchon

66. “But elephants have souls. Anything that can get drunk, he reasoned, must have some soul. Perhaps this is all “soul” means. Events between soul and soul are not God’s direct province: they are under the influence either of Fortune, or of virtue.”

— Thomas Pynchon

67. “But as with Maxwell’s Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.”

— Thomas Pynchon

68. “Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all-round assholery.”

— Thomas Pynchon

69. “In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where’s his basis for comparing?”

— Thomas Pynchon

70. “When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. Who could withstand the light? What viewer could believe in the war, the system, the countless lies about American freedom, looking into these mugs shots of the bought and sold?”

— Thomas Pynchon

71. “What happens to men sometimes,′ his father wants to tell Charlie, ‘is that one day all at once they’ll understand how much they love their children, as absolutely as a child gives away its own love, and the terrible terms that come with that, – and it proves too much to bear, and they’ll not want it, any of it, and they’ll back away in fear.”

— Thomas Pynchon

72. “We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero.”

— Thomas Pynchon

73. “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

74. “You can only cruse the boulevards of regret so far, and then you’ve got to get back up onto the freeway again.”

— Thomas Pynchon

75. “Sometimes in the shadows the view would light up, usually when he was smoking weed, as if the contrast knob of Creation had been messed with just enough to give everything an underglow, a luminous edge, and promise that the night was about to turn epic somehow.”

— Thomas Pynchon

76. “What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not the still photograph of finished character but the movie, the soul in flux.”

— Thomas Pynchon

77. “What’s known as bleeding-edge technology,” sez Lucas. “No proven use, high risk, something only early-adoption addicts feel comfortable with.”

— Thomas Pynchon

78. “The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had.”

— Thomas Pynchon

79. “Poetry is not communication with angels or with the “subconscious.” It is communication with the guts, genitals, and five portals of sense. Nothing more.”

— Thomas Pynchon

80. “Words are only an eye-twitch away from the things they stand for.”

— Thomas Pynchon

81. “You could fall in love with me, you can talk to my shrink, you can hide a tape recorder in my bedroom, see what I talk about from wherever I am when I sleep. You want to do that? You can put together clues, develop a thesis, or several, about why characters reacted to the Trystero possibility the way they did, why the assassins came on, why the black costumes. You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth.”

— Thomas Pynchon

82. “If America was a person, and it sat down, Lancaster town would be plunged into a Darkness unbreathable.”

— Thomas Pynchon

83. “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. Some.”

— Thomas Pynchon

84. “But Lord Blatherard Osmo was able at last to devote all of his time to Novi Pazar. Early in 1939, he was discovered mysteriously suffocated in a bathtub full of tapioca pudding, at the home of a Certain Viscountess. Some have seen in this the hand of the Firm.”

— Thomas Pynchon

85. “Do you remember, during the war, when Porky worked in a defense plant? He and Bugs Bunny. That was a good one too.”

— Thomas Pynchon

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

— Thomas Pynchon

87. “This spiritualist, this statistician, what are you anyway?”

— Thomas Pynchon

88. “The surf, only now and then visible, was hammering at his spirit, knocking things loose, some to fall into the dark and be lost forever, some to edge into the fitful light of his attention whether he wanted to see them or not.”

— Thomas Pynchon

89. “Out of the blackness of the ward, a half-open file drawer of pain each bed a folder, come cries, struck cries, as from cold metal.”

— Thomas Pynchon

90. “It is the dark, hard, tobacco-starved, headachey, sour-stomached, middle of the day, a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them know it, many about now are already onto the second or third pint or highball glass, which produces a certain desperate aura here.”

— Thomas Pynchon

91. “For recessional music there’s “Closing Time” by Semisonic, a four-chord farewell to the old century.”

— Thomas Pynchon

92. “Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. 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

93. “Only the framing material,” Lucas demurely, “obvious influences, Neo-Tokyo from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metal Gear Solid by Hideo Kojima, or as he’s known in my crib, God.”

— Thomas Pynchon

94. “Someday it’ll all be done by machine. Information machines.”

— Thomas Pynchon

95. “The Saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor than was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe or outside, lost.”

— Thomas Pynchon

96. “He is suddenly, dodderer and ass, taken by an ache in his skin, a simple love for them both that asks nothing but their safety, and he’ll always manage to describe as something else – ‘concern,’ you know, ’fondness...”

— Thomas Pynchon

97. “Increasingly she’s finding it harder to tell the ‘real’ NYC from translations like Zigotisopolis... as if she keeps getting caught in a vortex taking her farther back in time into the virtual world. Certainly unforeseen in the original business plan, there arises now a possibility that DeepArcher is about to overflow out into the perilous gulf between screen and face.”

— Thomas Pynchon

98. “There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance...”

— Thomas Pynchon

99. “There are stories, like maps that agree... too consistent among too many languages and histories to be only wishful thinking... It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything.”

— Thomas Pynchon

100. “It had been dark at the beach for hours, he hadn’t been smoking much and it wasn’t headlights – but before she turned away, he could swear he saw light falling on her face, the orange light just after sunset that catches a face turned to the west, watching the ocean for someone to come in on the last wave of the day, in to shore and safety.”

— Thomas Pynchon