Life’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.
THOMAS PYNCHONYou 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.
More Thomas Pynchon Quotes
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Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do.
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Perhaps its familiarity rendered it temporarily invisible to you.
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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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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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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.
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Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.
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Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.
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To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.
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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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It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.
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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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Someday it’ll all be done by machine. Information machines.
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A woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.
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They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.
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Can’t say it often enough — change your hair, change your life.
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Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.
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Time is never wasted if you remember to bring along something to read.
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Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.
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Why should things be easy to understand?
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My belief is that “recluse” is a code word generated by journalists; meaning, “doesn’t like to talk to reporters.”
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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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All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.
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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?
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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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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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For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross.
THOMAS PYNCHON