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

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Why should things be easy to understand?
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There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.
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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?
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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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Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person's time line sideways till they all coincide.
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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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Hey, over here! Have your picture taken with a reclusive author! Today only, we'll throw in a free autograph! But wait, there's more!
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Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.
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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.
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The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.
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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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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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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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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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Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do.
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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A woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.
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I dream that I have found us both again, With spring so many strangers' lives away, And we, so free, Out walking by the sea, With someone else's paper words to say.... They took us at the gates of green return, Too lost by then to stop, and ask them why- Do children meet again? Does any trace remain, Along the superhighways of July?
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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