Quotes from Thomas Pynchon

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are 'yours' and which are 'mine.' It's past sorting out. Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow pg 140)

Women could protest from now till piss flowed uphill, but the truth was, there wasn't one didn't secretly love a killer. And

Maybe you'll find out. Maybe in one of their bombed-out cities, beside one of their rivers or forests, even one day in the rain, it will come to you. You'll remember the Himmler-Spielsaal, and the skirt I was wearing... memory will dance for you, and you can even make it my voice saying what I couldn't say then. Or now.

At once Slothrop understands that he is surrounded by women who have lived a good fraction of their lives at war and under occupation, and for whom people have been dropping out of sight every day . . . yes, in one or two pairs of eyes he finds an old and European pity, a look he will get to know

She poured herself half a tumbler of Jack Daniels (the Paranoids having left them a fresh bottle the evening before) and called the L.A. library.

The toothaches got worse, she dreamed of disembodied voices from whose malignance there was no appeal, the soft dusk of mirrors out of which something was about to walk, and empty rooms that waited for her. Your gynecologist has no test for what she was pregnant with.

You know what the Indians say. You saved my life, now you've got to—" "Yeah, yeah, some hippie made that up.

and isn't it the curse of the drifter, the desolation of heart we feel each evening at sundown, with the slow loop of the river out there just for a half a minute, catching the last light, pregnant with the city in all its density and wonder, the possibilities never to be counted, much less lived into, by the likes of us, don't you see, for we're only passing through, we're already ghosts.

This ad in the middle was placed by some arm of the G-5-to-be, trying to round up a few 're-education' experts. Vital, vital stuff. Teach the German Beast about the Magna Carta, sportsmanship, that sort of thing, eh? Out inside the works of some neurotic Bavarian cuckoo clock of a village, were-elves streaking in out of the forests at night to leave subversive handbills at door and window—'Anything!' Roger groping back to his narrow quarters, 'anything at all's better than this. . . .

Are you the man who reads phone books?

On the doorsill the Paranoids, as we leave milk to propitiate the leprechaun, had set a fifth of Jack Daniels.

Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45°, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied [...]

Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals.

He sat forlorn, feeling as if that most feared enemy of sleep had entered silently on a busy night, the one person whom you must come face to face with someday, who asks you, in the earshot of your oldest customers, to mix a cocktail whose name you have never heard.

watching his son in quick pulses of attention.

Early in 1939, he was discovered mysteriously suffocated in a bathtub full of tapioca pudding, at the home of a Certain Viscountess.

There are places we fear, places we dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, sometimes, too late.

bearing the old Pewter Coffee-Machine venting its Puffs of Vapor

In this latest War, death was no enemy, but a collaborator. Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the real only fucking is done on paper. . . .

Down here everything was dark, but up there the gray conglomerate was being struck by the final light of day to an unanswerable brilliance.

All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic. Useful to you, gentlemen, but no longer so to us here.

Latitudes and Departures

Tutto questo mentre stavano imparando l'unica lezione della vita: che nella vita di un individuo accadono più incidenti di quanto un uomo possa ammettere, se non vuole correre il rischio di impazzire.

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.