Quotes from Thomas Pynchon

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Idealism is no good. Any concrete dedication to an abstract condition results in unpleasant things like wars.

Explosion without an objective', declared Miles Blundell, 'is politics in its purest form'.

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

What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?

What North Europe thinks of as its history is actually quite provincial and of limited interest. Different sorts of Christian killing each other, and that's about it.

Our history is an aggregate of last moments

She would give them order. She would create constellations.

Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.

The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.

Not me, paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much.

We have recently moved into an era when... everybody can share an inconceivably enormous amount of information just by stroking a few keys on a terminal.

Time is never wasted if you remember to bring along something to read.

Length is usually intensity. Not time.

I was dreaming ... about my grandfather. A very old man, at least as old as I am now, 91. I thought, when I was a boy, that he had been 91 all his life. Now I feel as if I have been 91 all my life.

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

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.

Paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right: you can never have too much.

Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together.

'Recluse' is a code word generated by journalists... meaning, 'doesn't like to talk to reporters.'

What, I should only trust good people? Man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense.

Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

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