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
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.
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.
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.
There are stories, like maps that agree... too consistent among too many languages and histories to be only wishful thinking.... It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything.
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.
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.