Quotes from Thomas Pynchon

I still don't even know for sure what a tendril is.

As ever, he is surpriz'd by the fierceness of their bodies, their inability to hold back, the purity of the not-yet-dishonest,— 'twould take a harder Case than Mason not to struggle with Tears of Sentiment.

The Business of the World is Trade and Death, and you must engage with that unpleasantness, as the price of your not-at-all-assur'd Moment of Purity.— Fool.

When you gentlemen come to stand at the Boundary between the Settl'd and the Unpossess'd, just about to enter the Deep Woods, you will recognize the Sensation....

Perhaps the only reason they survived, Stencil reasoned, was that they were not alone. God knew how many more there were with a hothouse sense of time, no knowledge of life, and at the mercy of Fortune.

part of me must have really wanted to believe--like a child hearing, in perfect safety, a tale of horror--that the unconscious would be like any other room, once the light was let in. That the dark shapes would resolve only into toy horses and Biedermeyer furniture. That therapy could tame it after all, bring it into society with no fear of its someday reverting. I wanted to believe, despite everything my life had been. Can you imagine?

He understood it to be another deep nudge from forces unseen, almost surely connected with the letter that had come along with his latest mental-disability check, reminding him that unless he did something publicly crazy before a date now less than a week away, he would no longer qualify for benefits.

he is every assertion the fucking War has ever made-that we are meant for work and government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia that are found among the idle and mindless hours of the day... --Gravity's Rainbow

failing to look inscrutable to any but the habitually dismissive ...

Not everybody benefits from a misspent youth.

Never know when a gal might need a laser.

Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.

I mean only that in our Times, 'tis not a rare Dispute, Maskelyne assures him. Reason, or any Vocation to it,-- the Pursuit of the Sciences,-- these are the hope of the Young, the new Music their Families cannot follow, occasionally not even listen to.

Was it home, the mercury-lit street? Was he returning like the elephant to his graveyard, to lie down and soon become ivory in whose bulk slept, latent, exquisite shapes of chessmen, backscratchers, hollow open-work Chinese spheres nested one inside the other?

How, Yusef wondered, can two men joke like that and tomorrow be enemies. Perhaps they'd been enemies yesterday. He decided public servants weren't human.

so claim'd are the Surveyors in their contra-solar Return by Might-it-bes, and If-it-weres, - not to mention What-was-thats.

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?

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.

When they happen across an Adventurer from Mexico, and the ancient City he has discover'd beneath the Earth, where thousands of Mummies occupy the Streets in attitudes of Living Business, embalm'd with Gold divided so finely it flows like Gum.

You see how many whips and things there are here. Our horses are very, very naughty.

On the book Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me) Coming on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch. Hilarious, chilling, sexy, profound, maniacal, beautiful and outrageous all at the same time.

Someday, with the right man in the White House, there will be a Department of Jesus, yes and a Secretary of Jesus.… Dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can't you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity—"I don't like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.

Nostalgia lurks, ready to ooze from ambush.

The row ostensibly has to do with tables versus CSS, a controversial issue of the time, which has always, given its level of passion, struck Maxine as somehow religious. She imagines it will be difficult, no matter which side prevails, to appreciate, ten years from now, the all-consuming nature of the dispute.