Quotes from Thomas Pynchon

Chotto, Kenichiro! Dozo, motto panukeiku.

Poetry is not communication with angels or with the subconscious. It is communication with the guts, genitals, and five portals of sense. Nothing more.

He gazes through sunlight's buttresses, back down the refectory at the others, wallowing in their plenitude of bananas, thick palatals of their hunger lost somewhere in the stretch of morning between them and himself. A hundred miles of it, so suddenly. Solitude, even among the meshes of this war, can when it wishes so take him by the blind gut and touch, as now, possessively. Pirate's again some other side of a window, watching strangers eat breakfast.

If there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty ...little heads.

Yeah, but nowadays it's all you see anymore is cops, the tube is saturated with fucking cop shows, just being regular guys, only tryin to do their job, folks, no more threat to nobody's freedom than some dad in a sitcom. Right. Get the viewer population so cop-happy they're beginning to be run in. Good-bye Johnny Staccato, welcome and while you're at it please kick my door down, Steve McGarrett.

You need to find true love, Doc. Actually, he thought, I'll settle for finding my way through this. His fingers, with a mind of their own, began to creep toward the plastic hedge. Maybe if he searched through it long enough, late enough into the night, he'd find something that might help --- some tiny forgotten scrap of his life he didn't even know was missing, something that would make all the difference now.

Mason glowers, shaking his head. I've ascended, descended, even condescended, and the List's not ended,— but haven't yet trans-cended a blessed thing, thankee.

Sometimes he'll chuckle at something, but rarely. Whenever somebody asks how come everybody's laughing at something and he isn't, Horst explains his belief that laughter is sacred, a momentary noodge from some power out in the universe, only cheapened and trivialized by laugh tracks. He has a low tolerance for unmotivated and mirthless laughter in general. For many people, especially in New York, laughing is a way of being loud without having to say anything.

Our beauty lies in this extended capacity for convolution.

You had to been there, kid. Everybody thinks now the Eisenhower years were so quaint and cute and boring, but all that had a price, just underneath was the pure terror. Midnight forever. If you stopped even for a minute to think, there it was and you could fall into it so easily. Some fell. Some went nuts, some even took their own lives.

Time travel, as it turns out, is not for civilian tourists, you don't just climb into a machine, you have to do it from the inside out, with your mind and body, and navigating Time is an unforgiving discipline. It requires years of pain, hard labor, and loss, and there is no redemption--of, or from, anything.

Yeah, actually, gamers in the house forever.

She drove like one of the damned on holiday.

A woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.

My mother is the war,' declares Roger Mexico, leaning over to open the door.

In recent weeks, in true messianic style, it has come clear to her that her real identity is literally, the force of gravity. I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which prehistoric wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History.

Damn you all. You have no idea what you're heading into. This world you take to be 'the' world will die, and descend into Hell, and all history after that will belong properly to the history of Hell.

People in this town saw only what they'd all agreed to see, they believed what was on the tube or in the morning papers half of them read while they were driving to work on the freeway, and it was all their dream about being wised up, about the truth setting them free.

Too many of us have to sit foolishly by while something comes out of the dark, strikes, returns to wherever it came from, as if we are too fragile for a world of happy families, whose untroubled destinies require that the rest of us be sacrificed.

They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.

the hole left by the moon's tearing-free and monument to her exile;

All variables are independent.

No, thought Oedipa, sad. As if their home cemetery in some way still did exist, in a land where you could somehow walk, and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones still could rest in peace, nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.

Stencil had called from a Hungarian coffee shop on York Avenue known as Hungarian Coffee Shop