Quotes from Thomas Pynchon

Keep it bouncing, he'd told her once, that's all the secret, keep it bouncing.

The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.

Japanese staff who claim not to know a word of English beyond "awesome" and "sucks", which for a vast range of human endeavour, actually, is more than enough…

Look at it, every day more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothin but portals to Web sites for what Management wants everybody addicted to, shopping games, jerking off, streaming endless garbage-

A market need no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself-its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened-that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable...

it was luck, dumb luck, that had put them each where they were, and the best way to pay for any luck, however temporary, was just to be helpful when you could.

She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love

Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.

1904 was the year the American Food and Drug people took the cocaine out of Coca-Cola, which gave us an alcoholic and death oriented generation of Yanks ideally equipped to fight WW II.

True pornography is given us by vastly patient professionals.

For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America, and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia.

Because everybody on the school board, and the railroad, and the PTA and paper mill had to be somebody's mother or father, whether really or as a member of a category; and there was a point at which the reflex to their covering warmth, protection, effectiveness against bad dreams, bruised heads and simple loneliness took over and made worthwhile anger with them impossible.

Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "?t" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now—what you're doing here

My belief is that 'recluse' is a code word generated by journalists... meaning, doesn't like to talk to reporters...

Yet I've noticed the same thing when your band plays — the most amazing social coherence, as if you all shared the same brain. Sure, agreed 'Dope', but you can't call that organization. What do you call it? Jass.

He is suddenly, dodderer and ass, taken by an ache in his skin, a simple love for them both that asks nothing but their safety, and he'll always manage to describe as something else--'concern,' you know, 'fondness...

Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do

It took me till I was lying among the Rats and Vermin, upon the freezing edge of a Future invisible, to understand that my name had never been my own,— rather belonging, all this time, to the Authorities, who forbade me to change it, or withhold it, as 'twere a Ring upon the Collar of a Beast, ever waiting for the Lead to be fasten'd on. . . .

On the face of it, Vehi Fairfield said finally, two separate worlds, each unaware of the other. But they always connect someplace.

Decisions are never really made—at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all-round assholery.

Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?

Zoyd was out of smokes.

She wondered, wondered, shuffling back through a fat deckful of days which seemed (wouldn't she be first to admit it?) more or less identical, or all pointing the same way subtly like a conjurer's deck, any odd one readily clear to a trained eye.

Same old Satanic pact, only more of it.