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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.

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
Like
Places
Roads
Grouping
City
Bond
Tracts
Cities
Named
Identifiable
Issues
Shopping
Freeway
Special
California
Districts
Purpose
Issue
Freeways
Less
Access
Census
Overlaid
Many
Concepts
Nucleus
Nuclei

More quotes by Thomas Pynchon

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Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem.
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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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Length is usually intensity. Not time.
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.
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Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?
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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Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.
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.
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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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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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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Time is never wasted if you remember to bring along something to read.
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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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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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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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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[Oedipa Maas] awoke at last to find herself getting laid.
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
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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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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).
Thomas Pynchon