Quotes from Thomas Pynchon

But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice—guessed and refused to believe—that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the rainbow, and they its children. . . .

Darkness invades the dreams of the glassblower. Of all the unpleasantries his dreams grab in out of the night air, an extinguished light is the worst. Light in his dreams, was always hope: the basic moral hope. As the contacts break helically away, hope turns to darkness, and the glassblower wakes sharply tonight crying, Who? Who?

What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing? --Gravity's Rainbow, V699

Fickt nicht mit dem Raketemensch!

The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.

as long as American life was something to be escaped from, the cartel would always be assured a bottomless pool of new customers.

You can only cruse the boulevards of regret so far, and then you've got to get back up onto the freeway again.

There are stories, like maps that agree... too consistent among too many languages and histories to be only wishful thinking.... It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything.

Time is never wasted if you remember to bring along something to read.

Everything is some kind of a plot, man.

I mean what they and their hired psychiatrists call delusional systems. Needless to say, 'delusions' are always officially defined. We do not have to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of expediency. It's the system that matters. How the data arrange themselves inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart.

She couldn't stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears. They seemed to know what she wanted, even if she didn't.

You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world's intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there's cataclysm.

It had been dark at the beach for hours, he hadn't been smoking much and it wasn't headlights – but before she turned away, he could swear he saw light falling on her face, the orange light just after sunset that catches a face turned to the west, watching the ocean for someone to come in on the last wave of the day, in to shore and safety.

Some typewriters in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4 could have ever hoped to.

I am having a hallucination now, I don't need drugs for that.

a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it...

I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which the pre-historic wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History.

The past, hey no shit, it's an open invitation to wine abuse.

There is a Hand to turn the time, Though thy Glass today be run, Till the Light hath brought the Towers low Find the last poor Preterite one . . . Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road, All through our crippl'd Zone, With a face in ev'ry Mountainside And a Soul in ev'ry stone Now Everybody -

Explosion without an objective', declared Miles Blundell, 'is politics in its purest form'.

You can only cruise the boulevards of regret so far, and then you've got to get back up onto the freeway again.

In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where's his basis for comparing?

What was "walking on water," if it wasn't Bible talk for surfing?