V. Quotes

“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, V.

“Keep cool but care”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“I am the twentieth century. I am the ragtime and the tango; sans-serif, clean geometry. I am the virgin's-hair whip and the cunningly detailed shackles of decadent passion. I am every lonely railway station in every capital of Europe. I am the Street, the fanciless buildings of government. the cafe-dansant, the clockwork figure, the jazz saxophone, the tourist-lady's hairpiece, the fairy's rubber breasts, the travelling clock which always tells the wrong time and chimes in different keys. I am the dead palm tree, the Negro's dancing pumps, the dried fountain after tourist season. I am all the appurtenances of night.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no" moments of truth. "It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which thenselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one's own unanswered.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof, or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which had come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the '30's, the curious fashions of the '20's, the particular moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“A schlemihl is a schlemihl. What can you" make "out of one? What can one make out of himself? You reach a point, and Profane knew he had reached it, where you know how much you can and cannot do. But every now and again he got attacks of acute optimism.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“You wait. Everyone has an Antarctic.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories, and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world's affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“What sort of an age is this where a man becomes one's enemy only when his back is turned?”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“Poetry is not communication with angels or with the" subconscious. "It is communication with the guts, genitals, and five portals of sense. Nothing more.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“Man, I want to die, is all,' cried Ploy.
'Don't you know,' said Dahoud, 'that life is the most precious possession you have?'
'Ho, ho,' said Ploy through his tears. 'Why?'
'Because,' said Dahoud, 'without it, you'd be dead.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“A woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“Ten million dead. Gas. Passchendaele. Let that be now a large figure, now a chemical formula, now an historical account. But dear lord, not the Nameless Horror, the sudden prodigy sprung on a world unaware. We all saw it. There was no innovation, no special breach of nature, or suspension of familiar principles. If it came as any surprise to the public then their own blindness is the Great Tragedy, hardly the war itself.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“She drove like one of the damned on holiday.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“Stencil had called from a Hungarian coffee shop on York Avenue known as Hungarian Coffee Shop”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“the only way clear of the cool/crazy flipflop 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, V.

“He was visited on a lunar basis by these great unspecific waves of horniness, whereby all women within a certain age group and figure envelope became immediately and impossibly desirable. He emerged from these spells with eyeballs still oscillating and a wish that his neck could rotate through the full 360 degrees.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“If there is any political moral to be found in this world,” Stencil once wrote in his journal, “it is that we carry on the business of this century with an intolerable double vision. Right and Left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouses of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets by manipulated mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future.
“What of the real present, the men-of-no-politics, the once-respectable Golden Mean? Obsolete; in any case, lost sight of. In a West of such extremes we can expect, at the very least, a highly ‘alienated’ populace within not many more years.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history's rags and straws.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing its world in only three.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“A phrase (it often happened when he was exhausted) kept cycling round and round, preconsicously, just under the threshold of lip and tongue movement: “Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.” It repeated itself automatically and Stencil improved upon on it each time, placing emphasis on different words— “eventsseem”;“seem to beordered”;“ominouslogic” —pronouncing them differently, changing the “tone of voice” from sepulchral to jaunty: round and round and round. Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“A city uninhabited is different. Different from what a" normal "observer, straggling in the dark - the occasional dark - would see. It is a universal sin among the false-animate or unimaginative to refuse to let well enough alone. Their compulsion to gather together, their pathological fear of loneliness extends on past the threshold of sleep; so that when they turn the corner, as we all must, as we all have done and do - some more than others - to find ourselves on the street... You know the street I mean, child. The street of the 20th Century, at whose far end or turning - we hope - is some sense of home or safety. But no guarantees. A street we are put at the wrong end of, for reasons best known to the agents who put us there. But a street we must walk.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“Time of course has showed the question up in all its young illogic. We can justify any apologia simply by calling life a successive rejection of personalities. No apologia I s any more than a romance—half a fiction—in which all the successive identities are taken on and rejected by the writer as a function of linear time are treated as separate characters. The writing itself even constitutes another rejection, another “character” added to the past. So we do sell our souls: paying them away to history in little installments. It isn’t so much to pay for eyes clear enough to see past the fiction of continuity, the fiction of cause and effect, the fiction of a humanized history endowed with “reason.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“You felt she'd done a thousand secret things to her eyes. They needed no haze of cigarette smoke to look at you out of sexy and fathomless, but carried their own along with them. New York must have been for her a city of smoke, its streets the courtyards of limbo, its bodies like wraiths. Smoke seemed to be in her voice, in her movements; making her all the more substantial, more there, as if words, glances, small lewdnesses could only become baffled and brought to rest like smoke in her long hair; remain there useless till she released them, accidentally and unknowingly, with a toss of her head.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“What of Thought? The Crew had developed a kind of shorthand whereby they could set forth any visions that might come their way. Conversations at the Spoon had become little more than proper nouns, literary allusions, critical or philosophical terms linked in certain ways. Depending on how you arranged the building blocks at your disposal, you were smart or stupid. Depending on how others reacted they were In or Out. The number of blocks, however, was finite.
"Mathematically, boy," he told himself, "if nobody else original comes along, they're bound to run out of arrangements someday. What then?" What indeed. This sort of arranging and rearranging was Decadence, but the exhaustion of all possible permutations and combinations was death.
It scared Eigenvalue, sometimes. He would go in back and look at the set of dentures. Teeth and metals endure.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.