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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
Never
Lines
Whim
Decision
Emerge
Around
Cooperation
Power
Manage
Best
Chaos
Real
Direction
Peeves
Made
Decisions
Whims
Really
Neither
Hallucinations

More quotes by Thomas Pynchon

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Length is usually intensity. Not time.
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A screaming comes across the sky.
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Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs--what were the chances of finding anyone else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it?
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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.
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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.
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Ills are many, blessings few, but dreams tonight will shelter you.
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So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.
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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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I mean what they and their hired psychiatrists call delusional systems. Needless to say, ‘delusions’ are always officially defined. We do not have to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of expediency. It’s the system that matters. How the data arrange themselves inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart.
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Teamwork, Koteks snarled, is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It's a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.
Thomas Pynchon
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They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.
Thomas Pynchon
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The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.
Thomas Pynchon
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If patterns of ones and zeros were 'like' patterns of human lives and death, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?
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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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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All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.
Thomas Pynchon
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What, I should only trust good people? Man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense.
Thomas Pynchon
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[Oedipa Maas] awoke at last to find herself getting laid.
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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My belief is that recluse is a code word generated by journalists... meaning, doesn't like to talk to reporters.
Thomas Pynchon