Quotes from Thomas Pynchon

You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world's intrusion into this one.

the casting had been typically Hollywood: they didn't look or act a bit alike.

Doc went automotively groping in this weirdness east on Olympic, trying not to flinch at what came popping up out of the gloom in the way of city buses and pedestrians in altered states of consciousness.

Bianca is usually silver, or of no color at all: thousands of times taken, strained through glass, warped in and out the violet-bleeding interfaces of Double and Triple Protars, Schneider Angulons, Voigtländer Collinears, Steinheil Orthostigmats, the Gundlach Turner-Reichs of 1895.

Tell Penny how groovy it was of her to set up this little get-together, oh, and hey—can I be frank for a minute?" "Of course," said Agents Flatweed and Borderline. Snapping his fingers, Doc sang himself out the door with four bars of "Fly Me to the Moon

Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.

Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

makeup supposed to look like no makeup or whatever

grownups acting like the worst kind of kids, kids acting like they knew what was going on.

In the last pocket of darkness before the glare of Beachfront Drive, they came to a pause, a timeless pedestrian gesture in these parts that usually announced a kiss or at least a grabbed ass.

Remember that Puritans were utterly devoted, like literary critics, to the Word.

That joyful feelin' when-you're up-on the ceilin

Suppose we considered the war itself as a laboratory ?

Was that how he'd died, she wondered, among dreams, crushed by the only ikon in the house?

Westside Hochdeutsch mafia, biggest of the big, construction, savings and loans, untaxed billions stashed under an Alp someplace, technically Jewish but wants to be a Nazi, becomes exercised often to the point of violence at those who forget to spell his name with two n's. What's he to you?

Aah, God help us, how sleazy is it, and how has it come to this? a rented palace, a denial of the passage of time, a mogul on the black-diamond slopes of the IT sector thinks he's a rock star.

How's that, Motella." "Ooh, like wondering how it must be, getting into bed with somebody, who has another person's name? tattooed on his body?" "No problem unless all you do in bed is read," muttered Lourdes.

Just don't tell me you're in love, OK? Sister, I ain't even in line.

For recessional music there's Closing Time by Semisonic, a four-chord farewell to the old century.

For about ten minutes the vengeful crew proceed to maim, strangle, poison, burn, stomp, blind and otherwise have at Pasquale, while he describes intimately his varied sensations for our enjoyment.

They lived for different futures, but they were each other's unrecognized halves, and what fascination between them did come to pass was lit up, beyond question, with grace.

He didn't know whether he was planning seduction, or combat,— these, at fourteen, being the only categories of Pleasure he recogniz'd.

Ruins he goes daily to look in are each a sermon on vanity.

A viewing population brought back to its default state, dumb struck, undefended, scared shitless.