Quotes by Thomas Pynchon

Theyre in love. Fuck the war.

Its 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.

Shit, money, and the World, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the countrys fate. But they did not prosper... about all they did was persist

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

There are two more turds, smaller ones, and when he has eaten these, residual shit to lick out of her anus. He prays that shell let him drop the cape over himself, to be allowed, in the silk-lined darkness, to stay a while longer with his submissive tongue straining upward into her asshole. But she moves away. The fur evaporates from his hands. She orders him to masturbate for her. She has watched Captain Blicero with Gottfried, and has learned the proper style.

And one cried wee, wee, wee, all the way— Jessica breaking down in a giggle as he reaches for the spot along her sweatered flank he knows she cant bear to be tickled in. She hunches, squirming, out of the way as he rolls past, bouncing off the back of the sofa but making a nice recovery, and by now shes ticklish all over, he can grab an ankle, elbow— But a rocket has suddenly struck. A terrific blast quite close beyond the village: the entire fabric of the air, the time, is changed—the casement window blown inward, rebounding with a wood squeak to slam again as all the house still shudders. Their hearts pound. Eardrums brushed taut by the overpressure ring in pain. The invisible train rushes away close over the rooftop.....

As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.

Sometimes things arent very clear, thats all. Things look like theyre going against us, and though it always turns out fine in the end, and we can always look back and say oh of course it had to happen that way, otherwise so-and-so wouldnt have happened--still while its happening, in my heart I keep getting this terrible fear, this empty place, and its very hard at such times really to believe in a Plan with a shape bigger than I can see...

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.

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.

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

Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs--what were the chances of finding anyone else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it?

It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus.

They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.

It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted … secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology … by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, “Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,” but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more … The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms – it was only staged to look that way – but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite …

The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of the machine-gun pattern. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a moments weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War cannot use, and so they die. The right ones survive. The others, its said, even know they have a short life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way that they do. Nobody knows why. Wouldnt it be nice if we could eliminate them completely? Then no one would have to be killed in the War.

The big scandal around IG Farben this week is the unlucky subsidiary Spottbilligfilm AG, whose entire management are about to be purged for sending to OKW weapons procurement a design proposal for a new airborne ray which could turn whole populations, inside a ten-kilometer radius, stone blind. An IG review board caught the scheme in time. Poor Spottbilligfilm. It had slipped their collective mind what such a weapon would do to the dye market after the next war.

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.

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

Beneath the rubato of the day abided a stern pulse beating on, ineluctable, unforgiving, whereby whatever was evaded or put off now had to be made up for later, and at a higher level of intensity.