Quotes from Thomas Pynchon

One of the sweetest fruits of victory, after sleep and looting, must be the chance to ignore no-parking signs.

from among pleasure boats strung like piglets along the pier...

So they begin: these vigils. Having put up their token resistance, Clyde and Johnny straddled chairs to either side of Pappy and settled down to drinking as much as Pappy but staying soberer.

Varieties of hypocrite, see. Like learning the different kinds of poison plants out here, some'll kill the stock, some'll kill you, but use em right and some, believe it or not, will cure you instead. Nothing vegetable or human that ain't of some use.

ROCKETMAN WAS HERE.

he had given the Kaffir a choice

But mob violence, like tourism, is a kind of communion. By its special magic a large number of lonely souls, however heterogeneous, can share the common property of opposition to what is.

Explanations did not, as far as he could tell, appear to be anything dogs either sought or even were entitled to. Especially dogs who spent as much time as Pugnax did up here, in the sky, far above the inexhaustible complex of odors to be found on the surface of the planet below.

Riot was her element, as surely as this dark room almost creeping with amassed objects. The street and the hothouse; in V. were resolved, by some magic, the two extremes. She frightened him.

dark and be lost forever, some to edge into the fitful light of his attention whether he wanted to see them or not. Shasta had nailed it. Forget who—what was he working for anymore?

Roger and Jessica leave the doctor at a side entrance, into which he melts, leaving nothing but rain dripping from slopes and serifs of an unreadable legend on the lintel.

Weapons and food have been firmly linked in the governmental mind for as long as either has been around.

Phoebus discovered—one of the great undiscovered discoveries of our time—that consumers need to feel a sense of sin. That guilt, in proper invisible hands, is a most powerful weapon.

We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky.

It is part of an old and clandestine drama for which the human body serves only as a set of very allusive, often cryptic programme-notes -- it's as if the body we can measure is a scrap of this programme found outside in the street, near a magnificent stone theatre we cannot enter.

Through the rest of the afternoon, through her trip to the market in downtown Kinneret-Among-The-Pines to buy ricotta and listen to the Muzak (today she came through the bead-curtained entrance around bar 4 of the Fort Wayne Settecento Ensemble's variorum recording of the Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto, Boyd Beaver, soloist);

el otro lado and an earlier day, in the years between grown

Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts. . . . No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets.

Do you believe what you're saying? How has Getting On With It been working out for you, then? You expect me to live in the eternal Present, like some Hindoo? Wonderful,— my own Gooroo, ever here with a sage answer. Tell me, then,— what if I can't just lightly let her drop? What if I won't just leave her to the Weather, and Forgetfulness? What if I want to spend, even squander, my precious time trying to make it up to her? Somehow? Do you think anyone can simply let that all go?

Fuck the war. They were in love.

Flagstones are slippery with mist. It is the dark, hard, tobacco-starved, headachy, sour-stomach middle of the day, a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it, many about now are already into the second or third pint or highball glass, which produces a certain desperate aura here.

Those whose enduring object is power in this world are only too happy to use without remorse the others, whose aim is of course to transcend all question of power. Each regards the other as a pack of deluded fools.

Blobb inquired around about the Trystero organization, running into zipped mouths nearly every way he turned.

Blues is a matter of lower sidebands—you suck a clear note, on pitch, and then bend it lower with the muscles of your face.