Thomas Pynchon Quotes

I'm history! No, I'm mythology! Nah, I don't care what I am, I'm free!

Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.

Every change is a challenge to become who we really are.

I am not who I was,' he whispered, gripping the edges of the column, 'but I know who I am.'... 'And I won't give up.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), It's always our self we find in the sea.

Sometimes you have to give yourself to somebody in order to see who you are. Sometimes you have to unravel things to get to the core

A person never knows their own true face. Everybody thinks that the phoney, posed social mask they wear is their real face.

He wasn't what I'd thought he was; maybe he never had been. I wasn't what I'd thought I was, either.

My friends don't understand, whether it's belonging to a country club or playing golf, or whatever a vacation is, that should make you happy. And it's like, "No, happiness is much deeper." I think people have to struggle to find things that give them purpose, the real meaning. Why am I alive? Why did God bless me with these skills or these resources? What am I to do with them? If God just lets some person be very fortunate, let's say financially, it's kind of a funny God.

Nobody who's really using his ego, his real ego, has any time for any goddam hobbies

I did not lose myself all at once.

Its funny because when I did feel like I came out and I just felt like I was being truthful to myself, (it was at) that point I became very successful. So you know, it took a true kind of facing that truth of myself and being honest, that was when the real kind of fame or whatever that kind of stuff happened for me.

Not being known doesn't stop the truth from being true. You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. Learning is finding out what we already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers and teachers. The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.

You must be the person you have never had the courage to be. Gradually, you will discover that you are that person, but until you can see this clearly, you must pretend and invent.

I changed my name because it didn't fit with the way I saw myself.

Whatever coast he's on, a man should be himself. I don't write in any particular idiom, I write Charles Mingus.

...He is sure that the Bailey he is now is closer to the Bailey he is supposed to be than the Bailey he had been before

The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.

It's been such a struggle to learn all that I have; I wouldn't want to give any of that knowledge up. That's why I've always loved acting; as a kid, I didn't necessarily like my real life, so I could escape into these other characters and experience a life completely different from my own.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

We wait all these years to find someone who understands us, I thought, someone who accepts us as we are, someone with a wizard's power to melt stone to sunlight, who can bring us happiness in spite of trials, who can face our dragons in the night, who can transform us into the soul we choose to be. Just yesterday I found that magical Someone is the face we see in the mirror: It's us and our homemade masks.

I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform.

You can't become another person if you're not self-aware.

The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.

I once was the walrus, now I'm John.