Quotes from Thomas Pynchon

For me, Shambhala, you see, turned out to be not a goal but an absence. Not the discovery of a place but the act of leaving the futureless place where I was. And in the process I arrived at Constantinople.

Sometimes in the shadows the view would light up, usually when he was smoking weed, as if the contrast knob of Creation had been messed with just enough to give everything an underglow, a luminous edge, and promise that the night was about to turn epic somehow.

There are two more turds, smaller ones, and when he has eaten these, residual shit to lick out of her anus. He prays that she'll let him drop the cape over himself, to be allowed, in the silk-lined darkness, to stay a while longer with his submissive tongue straining upward into her asshole. But she moves away. The fur evaporates from his hands. She orders him to masturbate for her. She has watched Captain Blicero with Gottfried, and has learned the proper style.

Teamwork, Koteks snarled, is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It's a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.

If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic,what else?

For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories, and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world's affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence.

and men of science,' cries dixon, 'may be but the simple tools of others, with no more idea of what they are about, than a hammer knows of a house.

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are 'yours' and which are 'mine.' It's past sorting out.

Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person's time line sideways till they all coincide.

Times of great idealism carry equal chances for greater corruptibility.

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.

Just be advised, boys,' she said, 'you'll want to watch your step, 'cause what I am is, is like a small-diameter pearl of the Orient rolling around on the floor of late capitalism-- lowlifes of all income levels may step on me now and then but if they do it'll be them who slip and fall and on a good day break their ass, while the ol' pearl herself just goes a-rollin' on.

Remember how they outlawed acid soon as they found out it was a channel to somethin they didn't want us to see? Why should information be any different?

What's this? What are the antagonists doing here – infiltrating their own audience? Well, they're not really. It's somebody else's audience at the moment, and these nightly spectacles are an appreciable part of the darkside hours of life of the rocket capital. The chances for any paradox here, really, are less than you think.

It seemed to him [Otto Kugelblitz] obvious that the human life span runs through the varieties of mental disorder as understood in his day—the solipsism of infancy, the sexual hysterias of adolescence and entry-level adulthood, the paranoia of middle age, the dementia of late life ... all working up to death, which at last turns out to be sanity.

But a few choosing to venture deeper into the painful corridors of their affliction, found after a while that they could now grind and polish ever more exotic surfaces, hyperboloidial and even stranger, eventually including what we must term 'imaginary' shapes (which some preferred to term invisible).

No matter how the official narrative of this turns out, it seemed to Heidi, these are the places we should be looking, not in newspapers or television but at the margins, graffiti, uncontrolled utterances, bad dreamers who sleep in public and scream in their sleep.

times of great idealism carry equal chances for great corruptibility.

After the 11 September attack, March editorializes one morning, amid all that chaos and confusion, a hole quietly opened up in American history, a vacuum of accountability, into which assets human and financial begin to vanish. Back in the days of hippie simplicity, people liked to blame 'the CIA' or 'a secret rogue operation.' But this is a new enemy, unnamable, locatable on no organization chart or budget line--who knows, maybe even the CIA's scared of them.

Culture attracts the worst impulses of the moneyed, it has no honor, it begs to be suburbanized and corrupted.

What sort of an age is this where a man becomes one's enemy only when his back is turned?

The grandeur of space, dig it. Zillions of stars, each one gets its own pixel." "Awesome." "Maybe, but it's code's all it is.

Is it just this miserable fucking city, too many faces, making us crazy? Are we seeing some wholesale return of the dead?" "You'd prefer retail?

Ten million dead. Gas. Passchendaele. Let that be now a large figure, now a chemical formula, now an historical account. But dear lord, not the Nameless Horror, the sudden prodigy sprung on a world unaware. We all saw it. There was no innovation, no special breach of nature, or suspension of familiar principles. If it came as any surprise to the public then their own blindness is the Great Tragedy, hardly the war itself.