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There is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.

Thomas Pynchon

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Thomas Pynchon
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: May 8
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Glen Cove
New York
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon
Jr.
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon
Real
Direction
Peeves
Made
Decisions
Whims
Really
Neither
Hallucinations
Never
Lines
Whim
Decision
Emerge
Around
Cooperation
Power
Manage
Best
Chaos

More quotes by Thomas Pynchon

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Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.
Thomas Pynchon
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Darkness invades the dreams of the glassblower. Of all the unpleasantries his dreams grab in out of the night air, an extinguished light is the worst. Light in his dreams, was always hope: the basic, moral hope. As the contacts break helically away, hope turns to darkness, and the glassblower wakes sharply tonight crying, Who? Who?
Thomas Pynchon
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To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.
Thomas Pynchon
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Liebig himself seems to have occupied the role of a gate, or sorting-demon, such as his younger contemporary Clerk Maxwell once proposed, helping to concentrate energy into one favored room of the Creation at the expense of everything else.
Thomas Pynchon
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Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no moments of truth. It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which thenselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one's own unanswered.
Thomas Pynchon
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Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person's time line sideways till they all coincide.
Thomas Pynchon
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What’s this? What are the antagonists doing here – infiltrating their own audience? Well, they’re not really. It’s somebody else’s audience at the moment, and these nightly spectacles are an appreciable part of the darkside hours of life of the rocket capital. The chances for any paradox here, really, are less than you think.
Thomas Pynchon
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Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together.
Thomas Pynchon
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If America was a person, and it sat down, Lancaster town would be plunged into a Darkness unbreathable.
Thomas Pynchon
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Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.
Thomas Pynchon
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Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.
Thomas Pynchon
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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.
Thomas Pynchon
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Some typewriters in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4 could have ever hoped to.
Thomas Pynchon
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Length is usually intensity. Not time.
Thomas Pynchon
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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
Thomas Pynchon
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Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.
Thomas Pynchon
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Some of us are afraid of dying others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself.
Thomas Pynchon
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What North Europe thinks of as its history is actually quite provincial and of limited interest. Different sorts of Christian killing each other, and that's about it.
Thomas Pynchon
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If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.
Thomas Pynchon
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Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.
Thomas Pynchon