Thomas Pynchon Quotes

I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.

It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so - I don't know - not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.

I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn't particularly want money. I didn't know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn't have to do anything. The thought of being something didn't only appall me, it sickened me . . . To do things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Mother's Day . . . was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep.

I teach how to fit into a world I don't want to live in. I just can't do it anymore.

The human comedy does not attract me enough. I am not entirely of this world. I am from elsewhere, and it is worth finding this elsewhere beyond the walls...but where is it?

But who are we, where do we come from When all those years Nothing but idle talk is left And we are nowhere in the world?" = MEETING =

Resurrection is a belief and hope in restoring this world.

Tell me where do I belong in a sick society?

The word is a sort of deliverance from the shifting world of appearances. The central teaching of the New Testament is that those who accept the word acquire wisdom and at the same time some identification with the eternal.

What can separate us from the love of God? An attempt to separate us by death simply releases us from the imprisonment of this world.

I don't know why this world keeps turning, round and round. But I wish it would stop and let me off right now!

I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.

For the ones who had a notion, A notion deep inside, That it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive I wanna find one face that ain't looking through me I wanna find one place, I wanna spit in the face of these badlands

This world is gradually becoming a place Where I do not care to be any more.

I think that if a person doesn't feel cynical then they're out of phase with the 20th century. Being cynical is the only way to deal with modern civilization - you can't just swallow it whole.

I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.

And how am I to face the odds Of man's bedevilment and God's? I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made.

It's difficult to explain, but I just somehow feel that I never really *have* lived; that I never really will live--exist or whatever--in the sense that other people do. It drives me crazy. I was terribly aware of it all those nights waiting for you in the Ritz bar looking around at what seemed to be real grown-up lives. I just find everybody else's life surrounded by plate glass. I mean I'd like to break through it just once and actually touch one.

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

I can detach myself from the world. If there is a better world to detach oneself from than the one functioning at the moment I have yet to hear of it.

A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.

Society, to be sure, does not like this very well; it saith, Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he declares all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; Society will retaliate.

[...] I suppose this was the first time I had ever felt an urge not to be. Never an urge to die, far less an urge to put an end to myself - simply an urge not to be. This disgusting, hostile and unlovely world was not made for me, nor I for it. It was alien to me and I to it.

She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?