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Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem.

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
Proletarian
Brash
Theorem
Theorems
Murphy
Law

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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.
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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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Some of us are afraid of dying others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself.
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Why should things be easy to understand?
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But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.
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The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.
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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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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).
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Not me, paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much.
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All variables are independent.
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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.
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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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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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Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.
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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?
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