Thomas Pynchon Quotes

The first light of day today revealed what we had feared. The devastation is greater than our worst fears. It's just totally overwhelming.

One day, when we were coming back from school, we saw this big cloud of smoke coming up, and all these fire-trucks in the yard. The garage was burning down. I was 14, and we'd lost everything.

War is the easiest photography in the business. Just get close, be lucky, know how your camera works. There are subjects everywhere. Everyplace you go, there is something to photograph in a war, like being in the middle of a hurricane or a train crash or an earthquake. You can't miss it.

The day I was born, my house burnt down; the day I left home, the Twin Towers burnt down; and I lived in a jungle in India at 15.

I was asleep, in the upstairs bedroom, in the rear of the house. There was this tremendous crash, there was a terrible wind force hitting my body, and then I blanked out.

Could this be the Apocalypse ?

In the same way that a tornado rips the roof off a double-wide trailer, leaving the occupants dazed and staring at the clouds from the splinters of what used to be their living room, it was over.

We are living even now among punishments and ruins.

...as if someone had thrown a hand grenade into the middle of a teddy bear orgy and the only survivors had had their fur blown off.

Clearly, I see it. I was just about to leave when I found her kneeling there. A mountain range of rubble was written, designed, erected around her. She was clucthing at a book.

When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand--a center of gravity.

So, you wrecked Alcatraz Island, made Mount St. Helens explode, and displaced half a million people, but at least you're safe." "Yep, that pretty much covers it.

A screaming comes across the sky.

The tarot card 'The Tower' seemed a chilling reflection of the events of September 11, 2001.

The end of the world started when a pegasus landed on the hood of my car

There was no other sound in the world like a car crash.

A world is in flames, and you are cracking silly jokes.

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away / You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

The whole world is a disaster waiting to happen.

The whole world's on fire.

They say they don't know when but a day is gonna come. When there won't be a moon and there won't be a sun. It will just go black. It will just go back to the way it was before.

Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.

All things around, convulsed with violent thunder, seem to tremble, and the mighty walls of the capacious world appear at once to have started and burst asunder.

It'll all end in tears and oil.

There's no theme, no moral to be learned, except for the knowledge that lightning can strike from a clear blue sky one morning and take away everything you've built, everything you've counted on, leaving wreckage and no meaning behind. It can happen to anyone, it can happen to you.