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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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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
Wrong
Wrongdoing
War
Antiwar
Truth
Questioning
Questions
Asking
Answers
Worry
Politics

More quotes by Thomas Pynchon

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Why should things be easy to understand?
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 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?
Thomas Pynchon
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This spiritualist, this statistician, what are you anyway?
Thomas Pynchon
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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.
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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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
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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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Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do.
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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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
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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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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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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!
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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In recent weeks, in true messianic style, it has come clear to her that her real identity is literally, the force of gravity. I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which prehistoric wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History.
Thomas Pynchon
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What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove's difference and the universe can be on into a whole 'nother song.
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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They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.
Thomas Pynchon
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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.
Thomas Pynchon