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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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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
Single
Accident
Ever
Sane
Men
Lesson
Life
Admit
Accidents
Lifetime
Lessons
Stay

More quotes by 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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Not me, paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much.
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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It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.
Thomas Pynchon
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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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The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.
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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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
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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
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Danger's over, Banana Breakfast is saved.
Thomas Pynchon
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Length is usually intensity. Not time.
Thomas Pynchon
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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?
Thomas Pynchon
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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.
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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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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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.
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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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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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