Quote

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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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
Time
Faith
Later
Phases
Fall
Losing
Prayers
Unanswered
Business
General
Misfortunes
Epiphany
Moments
Example
Concentration
Thought
Takes
Accidents
Examples
Truth
Prayer
Falling
Misfortune
Come
Small
Injustice
Godly
Much
Upon
Complicated
Accumulation

More quotes by 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.
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There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.
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All variables are independent.
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All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together.
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Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.
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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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Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem.
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Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.
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Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.
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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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Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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