Quote

All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.

Thomas Pynchon

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Sophisticated
Base
Abstract
However
Fear
True
Investigations
Human
Mortality
Humans
Investigation

More quotes by Thomas Pynchon

Image
It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
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.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
Can't say it often enough — change your hair, change your life.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
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.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
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
Image
Length is usually intensity. Not time.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
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
Image
The anarchist is dressed all in black. In the dark you can only see his eyes. It dates from the 1930's. Porky Pig is a little boy. The children told me that he has a nephew now, Cicero. Do you remember, during the war, when Porky worked in a defense plant? He and Bugs Bunny. That was a good one too.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
Some typewriters in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4 could have ever hoped to.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
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
Image
Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
[Oedipa Maas] awoke at last to find herself getting laid.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
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.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
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
Image
To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
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
Image
My belief is that recluse is a code word generated by journalists... meaning, doesn't like to talk to reporters.
Thomas Pynchon