Quote

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.

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
Others
However
Useless
Comforts
Men
Whose
Sells
Faded
Time
Dying
Defined
Addicted
Love
Generations
Serve
Desperately
Life
Talent
Ugly
Shallow
Willing
Generation
Terrified
Pain
Silent
Zone
Sperm
Death
Comfort
Sell
Passivity

More quotes by 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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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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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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The general public has long been divided into two parts those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.
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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A woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.
Thomas Pynchon
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There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.
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
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All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.
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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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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The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.
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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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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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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If America was a person, and it sat down, Lancaster town would be plunged into a Darkness unbreathable.
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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But on the way home tonight, you wish you'd picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As it it were you who could, somehow, save him. For the moment not caring who you're supposed to be registered as. For the moment, anyway, no longer who the Caesars say you are.
Thomas Pynchon
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Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem.
Thomas Pynchon
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She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as ‘pretty’…but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him.
Thomas Pynchon