But a few choosing to venture deeper into the painful corridors of their affliction, found after a while that they could now grind and polish ever more exotic surfaces, hyperboloidial and even stranger, eventually including what we must term ‘imaginary’ shapes (which some preferred to term invisible).

Thomas Pynchon

Categorized in : Shapes Affliction Exotic

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

Thomas Pynchon

asking-questions truth war

There is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.

Thomas Pynchon

lines decision real

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out.

Thomas Pynchon

sorting-out dream past

Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.

Thomas Pynchon

care mouths love-you

The reality is in this head. Mine. I'm the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, and sometimes other orifices also.

Thomas Pynchon

circles eye reality

What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove's difference and the universe can be on into a whole 'nother song.

Thomas Pynchon

records differences song

Time is never wasted if you remember to bring along something to read.

Thomas Pynchon

ifs remember

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

broken animal men

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.

Thomas Pynchon

dream loss memories

this is america, you live in it, you let it happen. let it unfurl.

Thomas Pynchon

happens america

Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem.

Thomas Pynchon

brash murphy law

Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.

Thomas Pynchon

weirdo wavelength world

Why should things be easy to understand?

Thomas Pynchon

should easy

Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.

Thomas Pynchon

lessons lifetime men

Length is usually intensity.

Thomas Pynchon

intensity length

Teamwork," Koteks snarled, "is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It's a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.

Thomas Pynchon

responsibility teamwork way

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.

Thomas Pynchon

ignorance writing thinking

The Saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor than was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe or outside, lost.

Thomas Pynchon

tunnels light lying

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.

Thomas Pynchon

remembers-everything spiritual thinking

A screaming comes across the sky.

Thomas Pynchon

sky