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There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.

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
Chance
Operations
Behavior
Difference
Pure
Differences

More quotes by Thomas Pynchon

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This spiritualist, this statistician, what are you anyway?
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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.
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My mother is the war,' declares Roger Mexico, leaning over to open the door.
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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.
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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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Shall I project a world?
Thomas Pynchon
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Length is usually intensity. Not time.
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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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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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
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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.
Thomas Pynchon
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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.
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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Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.
Thomas Pynchon
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Danger's over, Banana Breakfast is saved.
Thomas Pynchon
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They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.
Thomas Pynchon
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All variables are independent.
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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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
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If America was a person, and it sat down, Lancaster town would be plunged into a Darkness unbreathable.
Thomas Pynchon