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
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.
In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on as a heat engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons.
I was dreaming ... about my grandfather. A very old man, at least as old as I am now, 91. I thought, when I was a boy, that he had been 91 all his life. Now I feel as if I have been 91 all my life.
What sort of an age is this where a man becomes one's enemy only when his back is turned?
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.
Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.
It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.
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.
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.