Top 200 Thomas Pynchon Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “She drove like one of the damned on holiday.”

— Thomas Pynchon

103. “Of course it happened. Of course it didn’t happen.”

— Thomas Pynchon

104. “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

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

— Thomas Pynchon

106. “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

107. “You came to talk about the play,” he said. “Let me discourage you. It was written to entertain people. Like horror movies. It isn’t literature, it doesn’t mean anything. Wharfinger was no Shakespeare.” “Who was he?” she said. “Who was Shakespeare? It was a long time ago.”

— Thomas Pynchon

108. “But as we all know, rock ‘n’ roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever.”

— Thomas Pynchon

109. “They steered south. Gordita Beach emerged from the haze, gently flaking away in the salt breezes, the ramshackle town in a spill of weather-beaten colors, like paint chips at some out-of-the-way hardware store, and the hillside up to Dunecrest, which Doc had always thought of, especially after nights of excess, as steep, a grade everybody sooner or later wiped their clutch trying to get up and out of town on, looking from out here strangely flat, hardly there at all.”

— Thomas Pynchon

110. “I don’t do lunch. Corrupt artifact of late capitalism. Breakfast maybe?”

— Thomas Pynchon

111. “In the buses all night she listened to transistor radios playing songs in the lower stretches of the Top 200, that would never become popular, whose melodies and lyrics would perish as if they had never been sung. A Mexican girl, trying to hear one of these through snarling static from the bus’s motor, hummed along as if she would remember it always, tracing post horns and hearts with a fingernail, in the haze of her breath on the window.”

— Thomas Pynchon

112. “Death glided by, shadowless, among the empties on the grass.”

— Thomas Pynchon

113. “All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.”

— Thomas Pynchon

114. “It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.”

— Thomas Pynchon

115. “Some would say eccentric. I would say stoned out of his fuckin mind, nothing personal.”

— Thomas Pynchon

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

— Thomas Pynchon

117. “It was as if whatever had happened had reached some kind of limit. It was like finding the gateway to the past unguarded, unforbidden because it didn’t have to be. Built into the act of return finally was this glittering mosaic of doubt. Something like what Sauncho’s colleagues in marine insurance liked to call inherent vice.”

— Thomas Pynchon

118. “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.”

— Thomas Pynchon

119. “She had been privileged to live outside of Time, to enter and leave at will, looting and manipulating, weightless, invisible. Now Time had claimed her again, put her under house arrest, taken her passport away. Only an animal with a full set of pain receptors after all.”

— Thomas Pynchon

120. “I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which the pre-historic wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History.”

— Thomas Pynchon

121. “You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out.”

— Thomas Pynchon

122. “Social Darwinists of the day were forever on about the joys of bloody teeth and claws, but they were curiously uncelebratory of speed and deception, poison and surprise.”

— Thomas Pynchon

123. “If he is going into management, he writes. If he is an engineer or architect why he paints or sculpts. He will straddle the line, aware up to the point of knowing he is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why there should ever be a line, or even if there is a line at all.”

— Thomas Pynchon

124. “Some typewriters in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4 could have ever hoped to.”

— Thomas Pynchon

125. “Damn you all. You have no idea what you’re heading into. This world you take to be ‘the’ world will die, and descend into Hell, and all history after that will belong properly to the history of Hell.”

— Thomas Pynchon

126. “Look at it, every day more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothin but portals to Web sites for what Management wants everybody addicted to, shopping games, jerking off, streaming endless garbage-.”

— Thomas Pynchon

127. “Is the Tube human? Semihuman? Well, uh, how human’s that, so forth. Are TV sets brought alive by broadcast signals, like the clay bodies of men and women animated by the spirit of God’s love?”

— Thomas Pynchon

128. “That, indeed, the Home Front is something of a fiction and lie, designed, not too subtly, to draw them apart, to subvert love in favor of work, abstraction, required pain, bitter death.”

— Thomas Pynchon

129. “Runners are bouncing up and down at the curb waiting for lights to change. Cops are in coffee shops dealing with bagel deficiencies.”

— Thomas Pynchon

130. “The Lord’s angel, Gebrail, dictated the Koran to Mohammed the Lord’s Prophet. What a joke if all that holy book were only twenty-three years of listening to the desert. A desert which has no voice.”

— Thomas Pynchon

131. “I want to break out – to leave this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered inseparable, into the radiance of what we would become.”

— Thomas Pynchon

132. “Consider,” replies the Geomancer, “ – Adam and Eve ate fruit from a Tree, and were enlighten’d. The Buddha sat beneath a Tree, and he was enlighten’d. Newton, also sitting beneath a Tree, was hit by a falling Apple, – and he was enlighten’d. A quick overview would suggest that Trees produce Enlightenment. Trees are not the Problem. The Forest is not an Agent of Darkness. But it may be your Visto is.”

— Thomas Pynchon

133. “She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo – any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture.”

— Thomas Pynchon

134. “Here was world of simplicity and certainty no acidhead, no revolutionary anarchist would ever find, a world based on the one and zero of life and death. Minimal, beautiful. The patterns of life and deaths...”

— Thomas Pynchon

135. “Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn’t vanished with him. 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

136. “The fifth act, entirely an anticlimax, is taken up by the bloodbath Gennaro visits on the court of Squamuglia. Every mode of violent death available to Renaissance man, including a lye pit, land mines, a trained falcon with envenom’d talons, is employed. It plays, as Metzger remarked later, like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse.”

— Thomas Pynchon

137. “One glance at any government budget anywhere in the world tells the story – the money is always in place, already allocated, the motive everywhere is fear, the more immediate the fear, the higher the multiples.”

— Thomas Pynchon

138. “Liebig himself seems to have occupied the role of a gate, or sorting-demon, such as his younger contemporary Clerk Maxwell once proposed, helping to concentrate energy into one favored room of the Creation at the expense of everything else.”

— Thomas Pynchon

139. “Neither of them had ever had much interest in breaking each other’s heart. In theory they both knew she had to move on, though all he wanted right now was to wait, even just another day. But he knew that feeling, and he guessed it would pass.”

— Thomas Pynchon

140. “The smartest kid Justin ever met, back in kindergarten, had told him to pretend his parents were characters in a television sitcom. ‘Pretend there’s a frame around ’em like the Tube, pretend they’re a show you’re watching. You can go into it if you want, or you can just watch and not go into it.”

— Thomas Pynchon

141. “Remember that Puritans were utterly devoted, like literary critics, to the Word.”

— Thomas Pynchon

142. “But don’t they look like apes, now, fighting over a female? Even if the female is named Liberty.”

— Thomas Pynchon

143. “But in the dynamic space of the living Rocket, the double integral has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled... ‘Meters per second ’ will integrate to ‘meters.’ The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It never did fall.”

— Thomas Pynchon

144. “I was in the little boys’ room,” he said. “The men’s room was full.”

— Thomas Pynchon

145. “Together they are a long skin interface, flowing sweat, close as muscles and bones can press, hardly a word beyond her name, or his.”

— Thomas Pynchon

146. “Run away with me,” said Roseman when the coffee came. “Where?” she asked. That shut him up.”

— Thomas Pynchon

147. “It’s wrong because if you pick up a rifle, the Man picks up a machine gun, by the time you find some machine gun he’s all set up to shoot rockets, begin to see a pattern?”

— Thomas Pynchon

148. “Even though there is a villain here, serious as death. It is this typical American teenager’s own Father, trying episode after episode to kill his son. And the kid knows it. Imagine that.”

— Thomas Pynchon

149. “They lived for different futures, but they were each other’s unrecognized halves, and what fascination between them did come to pass was lit up, beyond question, with grace.”

— Thomas Pynchon

150. “You never want to see kids repeat your own mistakes.”

— Thomas Pynchon