Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist based in New York City, noted
for his dense and complex works of fiction. Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon spent
two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell more..
Thomas Pynchon:"If the U.S. was a person," he later became
fond of saying, "and it sat down, Columbus, Ohio would
instantly be plunged into darkness"
#America
Thomas Pynchon:Why should things be easy to understand?
#Understanding
Thomas Pynchon:This is America, you live in it, you let it
happen. #America
Thomas Pynchon:He had decided long ago that no Situation had any
objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in
on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a
sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must
necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four
dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing the world in only three. Hence
the success or failure of any diplomatic issue must vary directly with the
degree of rapport achieved by the team confronting it. This had led to the
near obsession with teamwork which had inspired his colleagues to dub
him Soft-show Sydney, on the assumption that he was at his best working in
front of a chorus line.
But it was a neat theory, and he was in love with it.The only consolation he
drew from the present chaos was that his theory managed to explain it.
#Teams and Teamwork
Thomas Pynchon:A screaming comes across the sky. It has
happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre.
There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above
him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far
above that would let the light of day through. But it's night.
He's afraid of the way the glass will fall soon it will be a
spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total
blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible
crashing.
#Cities and City Life
Thomas Pynchon:What are the stars but points in the body of
God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and
longing? #Family
Thomas Pynchon:He lies on top of her, sweating, taking great
breaths, watching her face turned 3/4 away, not even a profile,
but the terrible Face That is No Face, gone too abstract,
unreachable: the notch of the eye socket, but never the labile
eye, only the anonymous curve of cheek, convexity of mouth, a
noseless mask of the Other Order of Being, of Katje's being —
the lifeless non-face that is the only face of hers he really
knows, or will ever remember. #Age and Aging
Thomas Pynchon:I did not write those letters. This has been a
hoax that I've had nothing to do with. I'm sorry it's gone on as
long as it has.
#Medicine
Thomas Pynchon:...all investigations of Time, however
sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human
fear of mortality.
#Fear
Thomas Pynchon:Out and down in the colonies, life can be
indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done
to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white
marble statues, noble thoughts. #Cities and City Life
Thomas Pynchon:Each will have his personal Rocket. #Change
Thomas Pynchon:"I want to break out — to leave this cycle of
infection and death. I want to be taken in love: so taken that
you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered inseparable, into
the radiance of what we would become.... " #Death and Dying
Thomas Pynchon:LATER than usual one summer morning in 1984,
Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that
hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around
on the roof. In his dream these had been carrier pigeons from
someplace far across the ocean, landing and taking off again one
by one, each bearing a message for him, but none of whom, light
pulsing in their wings, he could ever quite get to in time. He
understood it to be another deep nudge from forces unseen,
almost surely connected with the letter that had come along with
his latest mental-disability check, reminding him that unless he did
something publicly crazy before a date now less than a week away,
he would no longer qualify for benefits. He groaned out of bed.
#Women
Thomas Pynchon:If America was a person,— and it sat down,—
Lancaster town would be plunged into a Darkness
unbreathable.
#Virtue
Thomas Pynchon:The reality is in this head. Mine. I'm the
projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible
in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, and
sometimes other orifices also.
#Politicians and Politics
Thomas Pynchon:You may never get to touch the Master, but
you can tickle his creatures. #Children
Thomas Pynchon:For a boy not getting any he had more
woman problems than anybody he knew. #Men and Women
Thomas Pynchon:Right and left; the hothouse and the street.
The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouse
of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the
streets manipulated by mob violence. And cannot live but in
the dreamscape of the future.
#Science and Scientists
Thomas Pynchon:It is usually not wise to discuss matters of
costume with people like this,— politics or religion being far
safer topicks.
#Politicians and Politics
Thomas Pynchon:Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45°, and so
had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side,
reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling
one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered
throughout the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a
transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or
mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose? Or
was it only the mirror world that counted; only a promise of a kind that the inward
bow of a nose-bridge or a promontory of extra cartilage at the chin meant a
reversal of ill fortune such that the world of the altered would thenceforth run on
mirror-time; work and love by mirror-light and be only, till death stopped the
heart's ticking (metronome's music) quietly as light ceases to vibrate, an imp's
dance under the century's own chandeliers....
#Life and Living
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