Quotes from Thomas Pynchon

How much money would I have to take from you so I don't lose your respect?" Crocker Fenway chuckled without mirth. "A bit late for that, Mr. Sportello. People like you lose all claim to respect the first time they pay anybody rent." "And when the first landlord decided to stiff the first renter for his security deposit, your whole fucking class lost everybody's respect.

Doc was into his own apprenticeship as a skip tracer, and each, gradually locating a different karmic thermal above the megalopolis, had watched the other glide away into a different fate.

Children who drank the milk from the dairy cows who grazed nearby were found leaning against telegraph poles listening to the traffic speeding by through the wires above their heads, or going off to work in stockbrokers' offices where, unsymmetrically intimate with the daily flow of prices, they were able to amass fortunes before anyone noticed.

Rescue, however, had many names, and the rope up which a maiden climbed to safety might be used to bind her most cruelly.

Will Postwar be nothing but events, newly created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?

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. Well right now Slothrop feels himself sliding onto the anti-paranoid part of his cycle, feels the whole city around him going back roofless, vulnerable, uncentered as he is, and only pasteboard images now of the Listening Enemy left between him and the wet sky.

Considerately, Stu Gotz, or somebody, has put on a MILF-night mix, which includes a lot of disco, plus tracks from U2, Guns N' Roses, Journey. And pandering to this crowd, way too much Moby for Maxine's taste, except possibly That's When I Reach for My Revolver.

Nothing like perpetual litigation to age a man before his time.

Hatred of the Jew was sometimes almost beside the point. Modern anti-Semitism really went far beyond feelings, had become a source of energy, tremendous dark energy that could be tapped in to like an electric main for specific purposes, a way to a political career, a factor in parliamentary bargaining over budgets, taxes, armaments, any issue at all, a weapon for prevailing over a business rival in a deal.

Folks out here talk about fate, but for Kit it was a matter of stillness.

Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker . . .

It was the end of something—if not his innocence, at least of his faith that things would always happen gradually enough to afford time to do something about it in.

There was just enough light from the fire to see the despair in Fleetwood's face, despair like a corrupt form of hope, that here at last might be his great crisis—the unappeasable tribesmen, the unforeseen tempest, the solid terrain gone to quicksand, the beast stalking him for miles and years. Otherwise what life could he expect as one more murderer with his money in Rand shares, destined for golf courses, restaurants with horrible food and worse music, the aging faces of his kind?

My father says everything's going to be machines when we grow up. He says the only jobs open will be in junkyards for busted machines. The only thing a machine can't do is play jokes. That's all they'll use people for, is jokes.

There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.

The true sensitive is the one that can share in the man's hallucinations, that's all.

Doc followed the prints of her bare feet already collapsing into rain and shadow, as if in a fool's attempt to find his way back into a past that despite them both had gone on into the future it did. The surf, only now and then visible, was hammering at his spirit, knocking things loose, some to fall into the dark and be lost forever, some to edge into the fitful light of his attention whether he wanted to see them or not.

The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will." ? Thomas Pynchon

paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much.

How many times," continued Lindsay Noseworth, second-in-command here and known for his impatience with all manifestations of the slack, "have you been warned, Suckling, against informality of speech?

Their boats ride the lenient Current together, in and out of the Shadows, ever in easy reach of rescue, the Boy shepherding them with Willow Wands, no more obtrusive in this Naval History than Gods in a Myth.

a bass drum thumped like the pulse of some living collective creature down there.

Beneath the rubato of the day abided a stern pulse beating on, ineluctable, unforgiving, whereby whatever was evaded or put off now had to be made up for later, and at a higher level of intensity.

So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be – its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator. - Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day)