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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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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
Everybody
Till
Spectra
Point
Anywhere
Coincide
Words
Pick
Shuffle
Happens
Picks
Sideways
Persons
Line
Coincidence
Person
Says
Arbitrary
Way
Happen
Differently
Time
Lines
Zero

More quotes by Thomas Pynchon

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All variables are independent.
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Danger's over, Banana Breakfast is saved.
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My mother is the war,' declares Roger Mexico, leaning over to open the door.
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Some typewriters in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4 could have ever hoped to.
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If America was a person, and it sat down, Lancaster town would be plunged into a Darkness unbreathable.
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This spiritualist, this statistician, what are you anyway?
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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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The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.
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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?
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Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.
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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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
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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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Time is never wasted if you remember to bring along something to read.
Thomas Pynchon
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She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as ‘pretty’…but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him.
Thomas Pynchon
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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.
Thomas Pynchon
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Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.
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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Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.
Thomas Pynchon
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Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.
Thomas Pynchon