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.
THOMAS PYNCHONIt all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.
More Thomas Pynchon Quotes
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They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.
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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.
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For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross.
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The reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, and sometimes other orifices also.
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Perhaps its familiarity rendered it temporarily invisible to you.
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A screaming comes across the sky.
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Life’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.
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If patterns of ones and zeros were ‘like’ patterns of human lives and death, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?
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Why should things be easy to understand?
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But with a sigh he had released her hand, while she was so lost in the fantasy that she hadn’t felt it go away, as if he’d known the best moment to let go.
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What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?
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All variables are independent.
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There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.
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What sort of an age is this where a man becomes one’s enemy only when his back is turned?
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Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.
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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.
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Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.
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Someday it’ll all be done by machine. Information machines.
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Can’t say it often enough — change your hair, change your life.
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She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as ‘pretty’ but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him.
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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.
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All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.
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Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.
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Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.
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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.
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Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.
THOMAS PYNCHON