Quote

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

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
Science
Two
Anything
Long
Divided
Think
Parts
Thinking
General
Afraid
Public

More quotes by 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
A screaming comes across the sky.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
Length is usually intensity. Not time.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
All variables are independent.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.
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
Danger's over, Banana Breakfast is saved.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
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
Image
All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
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.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.
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
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
Image
Darkness invades the dreams of the glassblower. Of all the unpleasantries his dreams grab in out of the night air, an extinguished light is the worst. Light in his dreams, was always hope: the basic, moral hope. As the contacts break helically away, hope turns to darkness, and the glassblower wakes sharply tonight crying, Who? Who?
Thomas Pynchon