Quote

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?

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
Ever
Expected
Settling
Suburban
Even
Seeking
Governments
Codes
Every
Aware
Narrative
Payoff
World
Willing
Code
Narratives
Anyone
Salvation
Diminished
Chance
Particularly
Transcend
Else
Findings
Settle
Payoffs
Government
Finding
Chances
Laboring

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My mother is the war,' declares Roger Mexico, leaning over to open the door.
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Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.
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I was dreaming ... about my grandfather. A very old man, at least as old as I am now, 91. I thought, when I was a boy, that he had been 91 all his life. Now I feel as if I have been 91 all my life.
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Length is usually intensity. Not time.
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Like so many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts--census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.
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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.
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Why should things be easy to understand?
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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
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But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.
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In recent weeks, in true messianic style, it has come clear to her that her real identity is literally, the force of gravity. I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which prehistoric wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History.
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Some typewriters in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4 could have ever hoped to.
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[Oedipa Maas] awoke at last to find herself getting laid.
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A woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.
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But a few choosing to venture deeper into the painful corridors of their affliction, found after a while that they could now grind and polish ever more exotic surfaces, hyperboloidial and even stranger, eventually including what we must term ‘imaginary’ shapes (which some preferred to term invisible).
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It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.
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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.
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Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem.
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If America was a person, and it sat down, Lancaster town would be plunged into a Darkness unbreathable.
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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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Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.
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