Where may one breathe?” demands one Continental Macaroni, in a yellow waistcoat, “ – in New-York, Taverns have rooms where Smoke is prohibited.” “Tho’ clearly,” replies the itinerant Stove-Salesman Mr. Whitpot, drawing vigorously at his Pipe, “what’s needed is a No-Idiots Area.

— Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon Quotes

The surf, only now and then visible, was hammering at his spirit, knocking things loose, some to fall into the dark and be lost forever, some to edge into the fitful light of his attention whether he wanted to see them or not.

— Thomas Pynchon

An assistant closed the heavy door on the lobby windows and the sun. She heard a lock snap shut; the sound echoed a moment. Passerine spread his arms in a gesture that seemed to belong to the priesthood of some remote culture; perhaps to a descending angel. The auctioneer cleared his throat. Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of lot 49.

— Thomas Pynchon

Doc was into his own apprenticeship as a skip tracer, and each, gradually locating a different karmic thermal above the megalopolis, had watched the other glide away into a different fate.

— Thomas Pynchon

You trusted people until they betrayed you, but the alternative, trusting nobody ever, turned you into one more Clive Crouchmas, and the world had enough of them already.

— Thomas Pynchon

He understand for a moment, as if in the breeze from an undefined wing passing his face, that the history of all this terrible continent, clear to the Pacific Ocean and the Artic Ice, was this same history of exile and migration, the white man moving in on the Indian, the eastern corporations moving in on the white man, and their incursions with drills and dynamite into the deep seams of the sacred mountains, the sacred land.

— Thomas Pynchon

Things then did not delay in turning curious.

— Thomas Pynchon

Duress is not an issue, – for life is a duress.

— Thomas Pynchon

After that long of more named pavements than he’d care to count, Profane had grown a little leery of streets, especially streets like this. They had in fact all fused into a single abstracted Street, which come the full moon he would have nightmares about.

— Thomas Pynchon

You’re so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew.

— Thomas Pynchon

Then again, it’s the whole Reagan program, isn’t it – dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity –.

— Thomas Pynchon

She walked in on soft, elegant chaos, an impression of emanations, mutually interfering, from the stub-antennas of everybody’s exposed nerve endings.

— Thomas Pynchon

Of course it happened. Of course it didn’t happen.

— Thomas Pynchon

In the buses all night she listened to transistor radios playing songs in the lower stretches of the Top 200, that would never become popular, whose melodies and lyrics would perish as if they had never been sung. A Mexican girl, trying to hear one of these through snarling static from the bus’s motor, hummed along as if she would remember it always, tracing post horns and hearts with a fingernail, in the haze of her breath on the window.

— Thomas Pynchon

Hand in hand with Brenda whom he’d met yesterday, Profane ran down the street. Presently, sudden and in silence, all illumination in Valletta, houselight and streetlight, was extinguished. Profane and Brenda continued to run through the abruptly absolute night, momentum alone carrying them toward the edge of Malta, and the Mediterranean beyond.

— Thomas Pynchon

How strange tonight, this city. As if something trembled below its surface, waiting to burst through.

— Thomas Pynchon

She waited, guttering with a small meek defiance, standing at the window and trembling, moonlight from a high angle pouring over her naked back, casting on it shadows of her shoulder blades, like healed stumps of wings ritually amputated once long ago, for some transgression of the Angels’ Code.

— Thomas Pynchon

I was in the little boys’ room,” he said. “The men’s room was full.

— Thomas Pynchon

Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.

— Thomas Pynchon

He had known for a while that certain episodes he dreamed could not be his own.

— Thomas Pynchon

On certain days, driving into Santa Monica was like having hallucinations without going to all the trouble of acquiring and then taking a particular drug, although some days, for sure, any drug was preferable to driving into Santa Monica.

— Thomas Pynchon
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