Quotes from Thomas Pynchon

One thing he had to give her credit for, she'd never called it a Relationship. What is it then, hey, he'd asked once. A secret, with her small child's smile, which like Rodgers and Hammerstein in 3/4 time rendered Profane fluttery and gelatinous.

She told him later that as soon as he took her wrist that night, she came. And the first time he touched her cunt, squeezed Jessica's soft cunt through her knickers, the trembling began again high in her thighs, growing, taking her over. She came twice before cock was ever officially put inside cunt, and this is important to both of them though neither has figured out why, exactly.

any concentrated mass is actually a local distortion of space itself, there happens to be exactly one surface, registered with the U.S. Patent Office, which, incorporated into a suitable hat design, will take the impact load of any known safe falling from any current altitude, transmitting to the wearer only the most trivial of resultant vectors.

Duress is not an issue,— for life is a duress.

She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo—any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture.

How much do you know of La Mayonnaise?" she inquired. He shrugged. "Maybe up to the part that goes 'Aux armes, citoyens'—

His workplace has become a rat's nest of empire building, turf defense, careerism, backstabbing, betrayal, and snitchcraft.

She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to. Doc hadn't seen her for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always sandals, bottom half of a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe & the Fish T-shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered, looking just like she swore she'd never look.

Dick" Counterfly had absquatulated swiftly into the night, leaving his son with only a pocketful of specie and the tender admonition, "Got to 'scram

I was in the little boys' room," he said. "The men's room was full.

The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safe-passage tonight to its far blood's branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see. Nothing of the night's could touch her; nothing did.

arriving at a mansion with another gate, low and nearly invisible inside its landscape gardening, seeming so much constructed of night itself that at sunrise it might all disappear.

Death glided by, shadowless, among the empties on the grass.

writers, people you didn't even have to say hello to—and still be horribly murdered for your trouble. Once-overs you'd found ways to ignore now had you looking for the particular highlight off some creep's eyes that would send you behind double and triple locks to a room lit only by the TV screen, and whatever was in the fridge to last you till you felt together enough to step outside again.

Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work.

Non-Masons stay pretty much in the dark about What Goes On, though now and then something jumps out, exposes itself, jumps giggling back again, leaving you with few details but a lot of Awful Suspicions. Some

You're so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew.

The Stars are so close you won't need a Telescope." "The Fish jump into your Arms. The Indians know Magick." "We'll go there. We'll live there." "We'll fish there. And you too.

Then again, it's the whole Reagan program, isn't it -- 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 --

She walked in on soft, elegant chaos, an impression of emanations, mutually interfering, from the stub-antennas of everybody's exposed nerve endings.

What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain. But were Oedipa some single melted crystal of urban horse, L.A., really, would be no less turned on for her absence.

Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. —WERNHER VON BRAUN

Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

Yep, and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there's no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don't think anything has changed, kid.