Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr.is an American novelist. A MacArthur Fellow, he is noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and nonfiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For Gravity's Rainbow Pynchon won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth8 March 1937
CityGlen Cove, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Some typewriters in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4 could have ever hoped to.
I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy." Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.
It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.
She thought of a sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west.
While nobles are crying in their nights' chains, the squires sing. The terrible politics of the Grail can never touch them. Song is the magic cape.
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
She would give them order. She would create constellations
Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneaker and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia.
But with a sigh he had released her hand, while she was so lost in the fantasy that she hadn't felt it go away, as if he'd known the best moment to let go.
This spiritualist, this statistician, what are you anyway?
So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be – its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.
So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.
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?