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.
THOMAS PYNCHONEverybody 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.
More Thomas Pynchon Quotes
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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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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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A screaming comes across the sky.
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There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.
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Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.
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Length is usually intensity. Not time.
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It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.
THOMAS PYNCHON -
There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.
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Someday it’ll all be done by machine. Information machines.
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Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.
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Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.
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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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All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.
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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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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.
THOMAS PYNCHON






