All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.
THOMAS PYNCHONLife’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.
More Thomas Pynchon Quotes
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Can’t say it often enough — change your hair, change your life.
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Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.
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There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.
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What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove’s difference and the universe can be on into a whole ‘nother song.
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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.
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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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You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there’s cataclysm.
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Ills are many, blessings few, but dreams tonight will shelter you.
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Someday it’ll all be done by machine. Information machines.
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The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.
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If there is something comforting – religious, if you want – about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.
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If the world offered nothing, nowhere to support or make bearable whatever her private grief was, then it is that world, and not she, that is at fault.
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Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do.
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A woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.
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It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.
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Length is usually intensity. Not time.
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Perhaps its familiarity rendered it temporarily invisible to you.
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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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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
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All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.
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Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.
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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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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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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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Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.
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Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.
THOMAS PYNCHON