The grandeur of space, dig it. Zillions of stars, each one gets its own pixel.”“Awesome.”“Maybe, but it’s code’s all it is.

— Thomas Pynchon

The innocent are guilty, the guilty are beyond hope, everything’s on its head, it’s a Twelfth Night of late-capitalist contradiction…

— Thomas Pynchon

The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator.

— Thomas Pynchon

The Northern powers are more like administrators, who manipulate other people’s history but produce none of their own. They are the stock-jobbers of history, lives are their units of exchange. Lives as they are lived, deaths as they are dead, all that is made of flesh, blood, semen, bone, fire, pain, shit, madness, intoxication, visions, everything that has been passing down here forever, is real history.

— Thomas Pynchon

The only way clear of the cool/crazy flip flop was obviously slow, frustrating and hard work. Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care. He might have known if he'd used any common sense. It didn't come as a revelation, only something he'd as soon not've admitted.

— Thomas Pynchon

There are places we fear, places we dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, sometimes, too late.

— Thomas Pynchon

There are two more turds, smaller ones, and when he has eaten these, residual shit to lick out of her anus. He prays that she'll let him drop the cape over himself, to be allowed, in the silk-lined darkness, to stay a while longer with his submissive tongue straining upward into her asshole. But she moves away. The fur evaporates from his hands. She orders him to masturbate for her. She has watched Captain Cicero with Gottfried, and has learned the proper style.

— Thomas Pynchon

There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not.

— Thomas Pynchon

These signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process. The process follows the same form, the same structure. To apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic. Useful to you, gentlemen, but no longer so to us here. If you want the truth — I know I presume — you must look into the technology of these matters. Even into the hearts of certain molecules — it is they after all which dictate temperatures, pressures, rates of flow, costs, profits, the shapes of towers…'' You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control?

— Thomas Pynchon

These times are unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one

— Thomas Pynchon