Top 200 Thomas Pynchon Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “London the secular city instructs him: turn any corner and he can find himself inside a parable.”

— Thomas Pynchon

152. “Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.”

— Thomas Pynchon

153. “They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.”

— Thomas Pynchon

154. “When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face.”

— Thomas Pynchon

155. “If her luck held, she’d never have to know. The baby was perfect cover, it made her something else, a mom, that was all, just another mom in the nation of moms, ad all she’d ever have to do to be safe was stay inside that particular fate, bring up the kid, grow into some version of Sasha... speak the right lines, stay within budget, wrap each day, one by one, before she lost the light.”

— Thomas Pynchon

156. “All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.”

— Thomas Pynchon

157. “Two of them there drinking red liquor like it was sadness medicine.”

— Thomas Pynchon

158. “Don’t commit original sin. Try and let her just be.”

— Thomas Pynchon

159. “Sure, she knew folks who had no problem at all with the past. A lot of it they just didn’t remember. Many told her, one way and another, that it was enough for them to get by in real time without diverting precious energy to what, face it, was fifteen or twenty years dead and gone. But for Frenesi the past was one her case forever, the zombie at her back, the enemy no one wanted to see, a mouth wide and dark as the grave.”

— Thomas Pynchon

160. “That night she sat for hours, too numb to even drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vaccum. For this, oh God, was the void.”

— Thomas Pynchon

161. “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

162. “Now everybody-.”

— Thomas Pynchon

163. “It’s nothing he can see or lay hands on – sudden gases, a violence upon the air and no trace afterward... a Word, spoken with no warning into your ear, and then silence forever. Beyond its invisibility, beyond hammerfall and doomcrack, here is its real horror, mocking, promising him death with German and precise confidence, laughing down all of Tantivy’s quiet decencies... no, no bullet with fins, Ace... not the Word, the one Word that rips apart the day...”

— Thomas Pynchon

164. “We are here among you as seekers of refuge from our present-your future-a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty-the end of the capitalistic experiment. Once we came to understand the simpl... truth that earth’s resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the whole capitalistic illusion fell to pieces. Those of us who spoke this truth were denounced as heretics, as enemies of the prevailing economic faith. Like religious Dissenters of an earlier day...”

— Thomas Pynchon

165. “Witnesses parade in, there is the travesty of a trial, and Ercole meets his end in a refreshingly simple mass stabbing.”

— Thomas Pynchon

166. “What sort of an age is this where a man becomes one’s enemy only when his back is turned?”

— Thomas Pynchon

167. “Ruins he goes daily to look in are each a sermon on vanity.”

— Thomas Pynchon

168. “Hand in hand with Brenda whom he’d met yesterday, Profane ran down the street. Presently, sudden and in silence, all illumination in Valletta, houselight and streetlight, was extinguished. Profane and Brenda continued to run through the abruptly absolute night, momentum alone carrying them toward the edge of Malta, and the Mediterranean beyond.”

— Thomas Pynchon

169. “Remember how they outlawed acid soon as they found out it was a channel to somethin they didn’t want us to see? Why should information be any different?”

— Thomas Pynchon

170. “On the face of it,” Vehi Fairfield said finally, “two separate worlds, each unaware of the other. But they always connect someplace.”

— Thomas Pynchon

171. “Wars have a way of overriding the days just before them. In the looking back, there is such noise and gravity. But we are conditioned to forget. So thet the war may have importance, yes, but stil... isn’t the hidden machinery easier to see in the days leading up to the event. There are arrangements, things to be expedited... and often the edges are apt to lift, briefly, and we see things we were not meant to...”

— Thomas Pynchon

172. “Doc remembered how Polaroids have no negatives and the life of the prints is limited. These, he noticed, were already beginning to shift color and fade.”

— Thomas Pynchon

173. “They’d never heard it that way. Went on warming their hands at an invisible fire. Oedipa, to retaliate, stopped believing in them.”

— Thomas Pynchon

174. “Look at this. A barstool, named Sven? Some old Swedish custom, the winter kicks in, weather gets harsh, after a while you find yourself relating to the furniture in ways you didn’t expect?”

— Thomas Pynchon

175. “Slothrop, who believes that women, like Martians, have antennas men do not, keeps an eye on her.”

— Thomas Pynchon

176. “He gazed at Reef in almost unconcealed envy, failing completely to recognize the darker thing, the desire, the desperate need to create a radius of annihilation that, if it could not include the ones who deserved it, might as well include himself. Webb.”

— Thomas Pynchon

177. “How’s that, Motella.” “Ooh, like wondering how it must be, getting into bed with somebody, who has another person’s name? tattooed on his body?” “No problem unless all you do in bed is read,” muttered Lourdes.”

— Thomas Pynchon

178. “Doc followed the prints of her bare feet already collapsing into rain and shadow, as if in a fool’s attempt to find his way back into a past that despite them both had gone on into the future it did. The surf, only now and then visible, was hammering at his spirit, knocking things loose, some to fall into the.”

— Thomas Pynchon

179. “In the last pocket of darkness before the glare of Beachfront Drive, they came to a pause, a timeless pedestrian gesture in these parts that usually announced a kiss or at least a grabbed ass.”

— Thomas Pynchon

180. “Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.”

— Thomas Pynchon

181. “You’re so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew.”

— Thomas Pynchon

182. “To rule forever,” continues the Chinaman, later, “it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call... Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People, – to create thus a Distinction betwixt ‘em, – ’tis the first stroke. – All else will follow as if predestin’d, unto War and Devastation.”

— Thomas Pynchon

183. “When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it with a transparent surface parallel to your own front that hums and bisects both your ears, making eyes very alert. The light bends toward chalky blue. Your skin aches. At last: something real.”

— Thomas Pynchon

184. “For about ten minutes the vengeful crew proceed to maim, strangle, poison, burn, stomp, blind and otherwise have at Pasquale, while he describes intimately his varied sensations for our enjoyment.”

— Thomas Pynchon

185. “Men had it so simple. When it wasn’t about Sticking It In, it was about Having The Gun, a variation that allowed them to Stick It In from a distance.”

— Thomas Pynchon

186. “Neither of them had ever had much interest in breaking each other’s heart.”

— Thomas Pynchon

187. “Maxine recoils, only partly out of the classic accountant’s allergy to real folding money.”

— Thomas Pynchon

188. “Out the window in the distance, contradicting the prairie, a mirage of downtown Chicago ascended to a kind of lurid acropolis, its light as if from nightly immolation warped to the red end of the spectrum, smoldering as if always just about to explode into open flames.”

— Thomas Pynchon

189. “A viewing population brought back to its default state, dumb struck, undefended, scared shitless.”

— Thomas Pynchon

190. “That joyful feelin’ when-you’re up-on the ceilin.”

— Thomas Pynchon

191. “Where may one breathe?” demands one Continental Macaroni, in a yellow waistcoat, “ – in New-York, Taverns have rooms where Smoke is prohibited.” “Tho’ clearly,” replies the itinerant Stove-Salesman Mr. Whitpot, drawing vigorously at his Pipe, “what’s needed is a No-Idiots Area.”

— Thomas Pynchon

192. “For many people laughing is a way of being loud without having to say a thing.”

— Thomas Pynchon

193. “They talked in the car always, he trying to find the key to her own ignition behind the hooded eyes, she sitting back of the right-hand steering wheel and talking, talking, nothing but MG-words, inanimate-words he couldn’t really talk back at. Soon.”

— Thomas Pynchon

194. “He didn’t know whether he was planning seduction, or combat, – these, at fourteen, being the only categories of Pleasure he recogniz’d.”

— Thomas Pynchon

195. “As if auditioning for widowhood, Sloane Wolfmann strolled in from poolside wearing black spiked-heeled sandals, a headband with a sheer black veil, and a black bikini of negligible size and made of the same material as the veil.”

— Thomas Pynchon

196. “Try to squeeze a watermelon into a small tumbler sometime when your reflexes are not so good. It is next to impossible.”

— Thomas Pynchon

197. “Exhausted, hardly knowing what she was doing, she came the last three steps and sat, took the man in her arms, actually held him, gazing out of her smudged eyes down the stairs, back into the morning. She felt wetness against her breast and saw that he was crying again. He hardly breathed but tears came as if being pumped. “I can’t help,” she whispered, rocking him, “I can’t help.” It was already too many miles to Fresno.”

— Thomas Pynchon

198. “I still don’t even know for sure what a tendril is.”

— Thomas Pynchon

199. “How strange tonight, this city. As if something trembled below its surface, waiting to burst through.”

— Thomas Pynchon

200. “An old rusty beer can lay in her path; she kicked it viciously. What is it, she thought, is this the way Nueva York is set up, then, freeloaders and victims? Schoenmaker freeloads off my roommate, she freeloads of me. Is there this long daisy chain of victimisers and victims, screwers and screwees? And if so, who is it I am screwing.”

— Thomas Pynchon