Quotes from Thomas Pynchon

If they got rid of you ... maybe because they thought I no longer needed you. They were wrong. I needed you. Only bring me that memory, and you can live with me for whatever time I've got.

there was the old hippie-hating mad dog himself, moonlighting after a busy day of civil-rights violation, as pitchman for Channel View Estates.

She gazed backward at iron convergences and receding signal-lamps. Outward and visible metaphor, she thought, for the complete ensemble of free choices that define the course of a human life. A new switching point every few seconds, sometimes seen, sometimes traveled over invisibly and irrevocably. From on board the train one can stand and look back, and watch it all flowing away, shining, as if always meant to be.

Mark, Reader, my cry! Bend thy thoughts on the Sky, And in the midst of prosperity, know thou may'st die. While the great Loom of God works in darkness above, And our trials here below are but threads of His Love.

Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of being connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good. The word has ceased to have meaning.

Poetry has to be as hasty and rough as eating, sleep or sex.

Change your name to Miles, Dean, Serge and/or Leonard, baby, she advised her reflection in the half-light of the afternoon's vanity mirror. Either way, they'll call it paranoia.

girls had turned overnight into whooping, hollering brides of the multitude.

I have look'd on Worlds far distant, their Beauty how pitiless.

Leunagasolin, such as, oh, the Moss Creature here, brightest

Pluto is in my sign now, held tight in its claws. It moves so slowly and so far away...but it will burst out. It is the grim phoenix which creates its own holocaust...deliberate resurrection. Staged. Under control. No grace, no interventions by God.

Doubt is the essence of Christ.

Turns out that some merrymaker has earlier put a hundred grams of hashish in the Hollandaise. Word of this has got around. There has been a big run on broccoli.

Rocketman! Spaceman! Welcome to our virgin planet. We only want to be left in some kind of peace here, O.K.? If you kill us, don't eat us. If you eat, don't digest. Let us come out the other end again, like diamonds in the shit of smugglers.

Profane si rese conto che stava per vomitare. Le esibizioni di smaccato sentimentalismo gli facevano spesso quel'effetto.

what we were doing out in that Country together was brave, scientifick beyond my understanding, and ultimately meaningless

SHE CAME ALONG THE ALLEY AND UP THE BACK STEPS THE WAY she always used to. Doc hadn't seen her for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always sandals, bottom half of a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe & the Fish T-shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered

She looked around, spooked at the sunlight pouring in all the windows, as if she had been trapped at the centre of some intricate crystal, and said, 'My God.' 'And I feel him, certain days, days of a certain temperature,' sad Mr Thoth, 'and barometric pressure. Did you know that? I feel him close to me.' 'Your grandfather?' 'No, my God.

She looked around, spooked at the sunlight pouring in all the windows, as if she had been trapped at the centre of some intricate crystal, and said, 'My God.' 'And I feel him, certain days, days of a certain temperature,' said Mr Thoth, 'and barometric pressure. Did you know that? I feel him close to me.' 'Your grandfather?' 'No, my God.

She watches Marvy's face as he pays Monika, watches him in this primal American act, paying, more deeply himself than when coming, or asleep, or maybe even dying.

Want the Change, Rilke said, O be inspired by the Flame! To laurel, to nightingale, to wind... to *wanting* it, to be taken, to embrace, to fall to-ward the flame growing to fill all the senses and... not to love because it was no longer possible to act... but to be helplessly in a condition of love...

We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune, And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.

Our history is an aggregate of last moments.

They fly toward grace.