Quotes from Thomas Pynchon

WE AWAIT SILENT TRISTERO'S EMPIRE.

he gets on this ARPAnet trip, and I swear it's like acid, a whole 'nother strange world—time, space, all that shit." "So when they gonna make it illegal, Fritz?" "What. Why would they do that?" "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?

Who am I to know my own  motives. But I did foolhardy things.

But then last September the rockets came. Them fucking rockets. You couldn't adjust to the bastards.

Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken.

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.

Tchitcherine: "You mean thio phosphate, don't you?" Thinks indicating the presence of sulfur …Wimpe: "I mean theo phosphate, Vaslav," indicating the Presence of God .

Destiny awaits, a darkness latent in the texture of the summer wind. Destiny will betray you, crush your ideals, deliver you into the same detestable Bürgerlichkeit as our father, sucking at his pipe on Sunday strolls after church past the row houses by the river — dress you in the gray uniform of another family man, and without a whimper you will serve out your time, fly from pain to duty, from joy to work, from commitment to neutrality. Destiny does all this to you.

Pointsman is finding it much easier to of late to slip into a l'etat c'est moi frame of mind--who else is doing anything?

But there I was, surrendering to a most extraordinary call from the grave, the mass-grave-to-be of Europe, as if somewhere ahead lay an iron gateway, slightly ajar, leading to a low and sombre country, with an incalculable crowd on sides eager to pass into it, and bearing me along.

You came to talk about the play, he said. Let me discourage you. It was written to entertain people. Like horror movies. It isn't literature, it doesn't mean anything. Wharfinger was no Shakespeare. Who was he? she said. Who was Shakespeare? It was a long time ago.

Yet is Dixon certain, as certain as the lightness he feels now, lightness premonitory of Flying, that far worse happen'd here, to these poor People, as the blood flew and the Children cried, - that at the end no one understood what they said as they died.

But should Bortz have exfoliated the mere words so lushly, into such unnatural roses, under which whose red, scented dusk, dark history slithered unseen?

What happens to men sometimes,' his father wants to tell Charlie, 'is that one day all at once they'll understand how much they love their children, as absolutely as a child gives away its own love, and the terrible terms that come with that,— and it proves too much to bear, and they'll not want it, any of it, and they'll back away in fear.

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.

Don't commit original sin. Try and let her just be.

When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. Who could withstand the light? What viewer could believe in the war, the system, the countless lies about American freedom, looking into these mugs shots of the bought and sold?

No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into --

If he is going into management, he writes. If he is an engineer or architect why he paints or sculpts. He will straddle the line, aware up to the point of knowing he is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why there should ever be a line, or even if there is a line at all.

Fathers are carriers of the virus of Death, and sons are the infected . . . and, so that the infection may be more certain, Death in its ingenuity has contrived to make the father and son beautiful to each other as Life has made male and female.

here in the Rue Rossini, there comes to Slothrop the best feeling dusk in a foreign city can bring: just where the sky's light balances the electric lamplight in the street, just before the first star, some promise of events without cause, surprises, a direction at right angles to every direction his life has been able to find up till now.

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

She had been privileged to live outside of Time, to enter and leave at will, looting and manipulating, weightless, invisible. Now Time had claimed her again, put her under house arrest, taken her passport away. Only an animal with a full set of pain receptors after all.

Is the Tube human? Semihuman? Well, uh, how human's that, so forth. Are TV sets brought alive by broadcast signals, like the clay bodies of men and women animated by the spirit of God's love?