Quotes from Thomas Pynchon

Death has come in the pantry door: stands watching them, iron and patient, with a look that says try to tickle me. •

Reader, she bit him.

Rich, chocolaty goodness

Not that the crew of the Toiletship itself were above a practical joke now and then.

Aitisi nai poroja," replied Veikko, a pleasantry long grown routine, meaning, "Your mother fucks reindeer.

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre (attributed to a French observer during the Charge of the Light

They went to lunch. Roseman tried to play footsie with her under the table. She was wearing boots, and couldn't feel much of anything. So, insulated, she decided not to make any fuss.

One of those cases where you couldn't just fold. God, across the table of Fate, was picking His nose, scratching His ear, laying on tells with a prodigal hand, it had to mean something, and a faulty guess would be better than none.

the figure dropped like an acid tab into the mouth of Time.

Trystero. The word hung in the air as the act ended and all lights were for a moment cut; hung in the dark to puzzle Oedipa Maas, but not yet to exert the power over her it was to.

Sooner or later Holytail was due for the full treatment, from which it would emerge, like most of the old Emerald Triangle, pacified territory—reclaimed by the enemy for a timeless, defectively imagined future of zero-tolerance drug-free Americans all pulling their weight and all locked in to the official economy, inoffensive music, endless family specials on the Tube, church all week long, and, on special days, for extra-good behavior, maybe a cookie.

Metzger flashed her a big wry couple rows of teeth. "Looks don't mean a thing any more," he said. "I live inside my looks, and I'm never sure. The possibility haunts me.

asleep. He fell asleep during Nibelungen.

Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away.

Man, I want to die, is all," cried Ploy. "Don't you know," said Dahoud, "that life is the most precious possession you have?" "Ho, ho," said Ploy through his tears. "Why?" "Because," said Dahoud, "without it, you'd be dead." "Oh," said Ploy. He thought about this for a week.

I am offended only by certain sorts of wallpaper

young man. Meet me at my place. Glück." So

Bigfoot didn't answer but there were times Doc could hear his silences, and this one was saying Too Much You Can't Know About So Fuck Off.

Aye, some of us have never seen him, only heard his steps on the nights when there is no Moon, or his voice, speaking from above the only words he knows,— 'Eyeh asher Eyeh,' "—in on which, in Tones hush'd, though ominous, the others now join. "That is, 'I am that which I am,'" helpfully translates a somehow nautical-looking Indiv. with gigantick Fore-Arms, and one Eye ever a-Squint from the Smoke of his Pipe.

The history of the old Hereros is one of lost messages. It began in mythical times, when the sly hare who nests in the Moon brought death among men, instead of the Moon's true message. The true message has never come.

Listen, Hilarius said after awhile, have I seemed to you a good enough Freudian? Have I ever deviated seriously? You made faces now and then, said Oedipa, but that's minor.

All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic.

Zoyd remembered her...as a tall florid girl in a minidress that bore the image, from neck to hemline, of Frank Zappa's face, thus linking her in Zoyd's mind somehow with Mount Rushmore.

Piss runneth downhill, and Pay-Day is Saturday, -now you're a qualified Fence-runner.