THOMAS PYNCHON

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She would give them order. She would create constellations.

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

I have this guitar on which I occasionally kill time making up rock n' roll lyrics.

Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.

We have recently moved into an era when... everybody can share an inconceivably enormous amount of information just by stroking a few keys on a terminal.

'Recluse' is a code word generated by journalists... meaning, 'doesn't like to talk to reporters.'

Idealism is no good. Any concrete dedication to an abstract condition results in unpleasant things like wars.

Paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right: you can never have too much.

So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.

She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike "clues" were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night.

The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.

This spiritualist, this statistician, what are you anyway?

The anarchist is dressed all in black. In the dark you can only see his eyes. It dates from the 1930's. Porky Pig is a little boy. The children told me that he has a nephew now, Cicero. Do you remember, during the war, when Porky worked in a defense plant? He and Bugs Bunny. That was a good one too.

Why should things be easy to understand?

For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross

For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.

Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information machines.

Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.

You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

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.

Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.