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Time Quotes by Thomas Pynchon

56 Time quotes by Thomas Pynchon

All Time quotes Thomas Pynchon’s page

A silent figure in the woods can make you feel the weight of unknown answers, like Bigfoot’s quiet absence. Pynchon paints a city as a reminder of lost innocence, where idealism and corruption walk side by side. He also points out that length is about intensity, not just time, urging us to focus on the depth of moments.

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“These times are unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one”

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Our history is an aggregate of last moments

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Length is usually intensity. Not time.

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“The past, hey no shit, it's an open invitation to wine abuse.”

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“In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where's his basis…

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He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.

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“[...] times of great idealism carry equal chances for great corruptibility.”

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All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.

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“Bigfoot didn’t answer but there were times Doc could hear his silences, and this one was saying Too Much You Can’t Know…

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“There is a Hand to turn the time, Though thy Glass today be run, Till the Light hath brought the Towers low…

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But with a sigh he had released her hand, while she was so lost in the fantasy that she hadn't felt it…

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“Perhaps the only reason they survived, Stencil reasoned, was that they were not alone. God knew how many more there were with…

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“But Lord Blatherard Osmo was able at last to devote all of his time to Novi Pazar. Early in 1939, he was…

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“The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouse of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in…

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She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as ‘pretty’…but he could never tell her all the rest,…

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Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time,…

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You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one. Most of the time we…

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“. . . yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of…

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“And what we’ve been always been is…?” “Is living on borrowed time. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere…

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But on the way home tonight, you wish you'd picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to…

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“Yep, and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our…

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“San Narciso was a name; an incident among our climatic records of dreams and what dreams became among our accumulated daylight, a…

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So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of…

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“Some mornings they awake and can believe that they traverse an Eden, unbearably fair in the Dawn, squandering all its Beauty, day…

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“For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories, and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one…

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“His life had been tied to the past. He’d seen himself a point on a moving wavefront, propagating through sterile history—a known…

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“And one cried wee, wee, wee, all the way—" Jessica breaking down in a giggle as he reaches for the spot along…

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“At the ukulele workshop that summer. He lectured on the four-note chord in the context of timelessness, and described himself then as…

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“They have had their moment of freedom. Webley has only been a guest star. Now it’s back to the cages and the…

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“remember didn't you sneak away from camp to have a moment alone with What you felt stirring across the land . .…

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“Time of course has showed the question up in all its young illogic. We can justify any apologia simply by calling life…

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“Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her…

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“She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all…

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“She told him later that as soon as he took her wrist that night, she came. And the first time he touched…

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“So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a…

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“There came to McClintic something it was time he got around to seeing: that the only way clear of the cool/crazy flipflop…

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“He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened…

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Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no "moments of truth." It takes much thought and…

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“There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present as his own assembley--perhaps heavily…

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“The Telescope, the Flaxions, the inventions of Logarithms and the frenzy of multiplication, often for its own sake, that follow'd have for…

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More by Thomas Pynchon

“How strange tonight, this city. As if something trembled below its surface, waiting to burst through.”

“It was one of those great iron afternoons in London: the yellow sun being teased apart by a thoasand chimneys breathing, fawning upward without…

“Surely for as long as there have been nights as bad as this one---something to raise the possibility of another night that could actually,…

“Death glided by, shadowless, among the empties on the grass.”

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

“Out of that night and day of unconditional wrath, folks would've expected to see any city, if it survived, all newly reborn, purified by…

“As spread thighs are to the libertine...so was the letter V to young Stencil.”

“Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories…

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

“remember didn't you sneak away from camp to have a moment alone with What you felt stirring across the land . . . it…

“Through rain...then through dreaming glass, green with the evening. And herself in chair, old-fashioned, bonneted, looking west over the deck of Earth, inferno red…

“She knew instinctively: he will be fine as the fraternity boy just out of an Ivy League school who knows he will never stop…

“Lovely morning, World War Two.”

“Listen to anything and take it apart again. Spectrum analysis, in my head. I can break down chords, and timbres, and words too into…

A screaming comes across the sky.