Quotes from Thomas Pynchon

If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

I went to the zoo once and saw this thing they call an anteater. That was quite enough for me.

Danger's over, Banana Breakfast is saved.

For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.

She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as 'pretty'… but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him.

Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.

So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.

I dream that I have found us both again, With spring so many strangers' lives away, And we, so free, Out walking by the sea, With someone else's paper words to say.... They took us at the gates of green return, Too lost by then to stop, and ask them why- Do children meet again? Does any trace remain, Along the superhighways of July?

Let the peace of this day be here tomorrow when I wake up.

He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.

To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.

The object of life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that, however it finds you, it finds you under very weird circumstances.

Next worst thing to unrequited Love, isn't it? Insufficient hate.

yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever.

Questions arose. Like, what in the fuck was going on here, basically.

This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl.

But with a sigh he had released her hand, while she was so lost in the fantasy that she hadn't felt it go away, as if he'd known the best moment to let go.

Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs--what were the chances of finding anyone else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it?

Once they have you asking the wrong questions. They don't have to worry about the answers.

Damned Beaver/Jeremy is the War, 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....Damn them, they are wrong. They are insane.

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

Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit.

It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.

Can't say it often enough - change your hair, change your life.