Quotes from Thomas Pynchon

Yet who can presume to say what the war wants, so vast and aloof it is… so absentee.

They're in love. Fuck the war.

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.

They're in love. Fuck the war.

Why should things be easy to understand?

It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.

I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy." Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.

Keep cool but care

Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.

A screaming comes across the sky.

The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.

There is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.

All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.

Shall I project a world?

Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.

You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.

What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove's difference and the universe can be on into a whole 'nother song.

There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.

It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.