Quotes by Thomas Pynchon

The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator.

As if somehow irony,” she recaps for Maxine, “as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious — weakening its grip on ‘reality.’ So all kinds of make-believe—forget the delusional state the country’s in already—must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now.”“Yeah, the kids are even getting it at school.” Ms. Cheung, an English teacher who if Kugelblitz were a town would be the neighborhood scold, has announced that there shall be no more fictional reading assignments. Otis is terrified, Ziggy less so. Maxine will walk in on them watching Rugrats or reruns of Rocko’s Modern Life, and they holler by reflex, “Don’t tell Ms. Cheung!”“You notice,” Heidi continues, “how ‘reality’ programming is suddenly all over the cable, like dog shit? Of course, it’s so producers shouldn’t have to pay real actors scale. But wait! There’s more! Somebody needs this nation of starers believing they’re all wised up at last, hardened and hip to the human condition, freed from the fictions that led them so astray, as if paying attention to made-up lives was some form of evil drug abuse that the collapse of the towers cured by scaring everybody straight again.

The Dopers DreamLast night I dreamed I was plugged right inTo a bubblin hookah so high,When all of a sudden some Arab jinniJump up just a-winkin his eye.Im here to obey all your wishes, he told me.As for words I was trying to grope.Good buddy, I cried, you could surely oblige meBy turning me on to some dope!With a bigfat smile he took ahold of my hand,And we flew down the sky in a flash,And the first thing I saw in the land where he took meWas a whole solid mountain of hash!All the trees was a-bloomin with pink n purple pills,Whur the Romilar River flowed by,To the magic mushrooms as wild as a rainbow,So pretty that I wanted to cry.All the girls come to greet us, so sweet in slow motion,Mourning glories woven into their hair,Bringin great big handfuls of snowy cocaine,All their dope they were eager to share.We we dallied for days, just a-ballin and smokin,In the flowering Panama Red,Just piggin on peyote and nutmeg tea,And those brownies so kind to your head.Now I couldve passed that good time forever,And I really was fixing to stay,But you know that jinni turned out, tbe a narco man,And he busted me right whur I lay.And he took me back to a cold, cold worldN now mprisons whurever I be...And I dream of the days back in DoperlandAnd I wonder, will I ever go free?

There are places we fear, places we dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, sometimes, too late.

Could he have been the fork in the road American never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropite heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper? Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot? It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back--maybe that anarchist he met in Zurich was right, maybe for a little while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared...

Nobody wanted to hear about all the Preterite, the many God passes over when he chooses a few for salvation. William argued holiness for these second Sheep, without whom thered be no elect. You can bet the Elect in Boston were pissed off about that. And it got worse. William felt that what Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot was for the Preterite. Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart. How can Jesus be an exception? could we feel for him anything but horror in the face of the unnatural, the extracreational? Well, if he is the son of man, and if what we feel is not horror but love, then we have to love Judas too. Right? How William avoided being burned for heresy, nobody knows.

One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living... and with each one, he thinks he feels patterns on his cortex going dark, settling to sleep forever, parts of whoever hes been losing all definition, reverting to dumb chemistry...

You felt shed done a thousand secret things to her eyes. They needed no haze of cigarette smoke to look at you out of sexy and fathomless, but carried their own along with them. New York must have been for her a city of smoke, its streets the courtyards of limbo, its bodies like wraiths. Smoke seemed to be in her voice, in her movements; making her all the more substantial, more there, as if words, glances, small lewdnesses could only become baffled and brought to rest like smoke in her long hair; remain there useless till she released them, accidentally and unknowingly, with a toss of her head.

Cant say it often enough - change your hair, change your life.

Why should things be easy to understand?

If patterns of ones and zeroes were like patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?

The silences here are retreats of sound, like the retreat of the surf before a tidal wave: sound draining away, down slopes of acoustic passage, to gather, someplace else, to a great surge of noise.

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.

For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories, and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world’s affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence.For them the music was sweet and painful, the strolling chains of tourists like a Dance of Death. They stood on the curb, gazing at one another, jostled against by hawkers and sightseers, lost as much perhaps in that bond of youth as in the depths of the eyes each contemplated.

It had been dark at the beach for hours, he hadnt been smoking much and it wasnt 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.

You’re chicken, she told herself, snapping her seat belt. This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl.

The grandeur of space, dig it. Zillions of stars, each one gets its own pixel.”“Awesome.”“Maybe, but it’s code’s all it is.

I dont do lunch. Corrupt artifact of late capitalism. Breakfast maybe?

Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away.

This generation - its almost a religious thing now. The millennium, the end days, no need to be responsible anymore to the future. A burden has been lifted from them. The Baby Jesus is managing the portfolio of earthly affairs, and nobody begrudges Him the carried interest...