Quotes from Thomas Pynchon

Like so many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts--census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.

As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.

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

These times are unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one

the one Word that rips apart the day...

The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit. We do know what's going on, and we let it go on. As long as we can see them, stare at them, those massively moneyed, once in a while. As long as they allow us a glimpse, however rarely. We need that. And they know it - how often, under what conditions...

There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not.

Oh, this beer here is cold, cold and hop-bitter, no point coming up for air, gulp, till it's all--hahhhh.

Dealing with the Hippie is generally straightforward. His childlike nature will usually respond positively to drugs, sex, and/or rock and roll, although in which order these are to be deployed must depend on conditions specific to the moment.

It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.

Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself.

Hair and drug-use issues notwithstanding, I've never thought of you as any less than professional.

Some would say eccentric. I would say stoned out of his fuckin mind, nothing personal.

Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for, and though it kills me to say it, it's what rock and roll is becoming - just another way to claim our attention, so that beautiful certainty we had starts to fade, and after a while they have us convinced all over again that we really are going to die. And they've got us again.

So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be – its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.

Lovely morning, World War Two.

You wait. Everyone has an Antarctic.

And when Franz Ferdinand pays, everybody pays!

A weapon based on Time . . . mused Viktor Mulciber. Well, why not? The one force no one knows how to defeat, resist, or reverse. It kills all forms of life sooner or later. With a Time-weapon you could become the most feared person in history. I'd rather be loved, said Root. Mulciber shrugged. You're young.

The Santa Monica Freeway is traditionally the scene of every form of automotive folly known to man. It is not white and well-bred like the San Diego, nor as treacherously engineered as the Pasadena, nor quite as ghetto-suicidal as the Harbor. No, one hesitates to say it, but the Santa Monica is a freeway for freaks.

This spiritualist, this statistician, what are you anyway?

A schlemihl is a schlemihl. What can you make out of one? What can one make out of himself? You reach a point, and Profane knew he had reached it, where you know how much you can and cannot do. But every now and again he got attacks of acute optimism.

Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.

Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.