History Quote by Thomas Pynchon

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

Thomas Pynchon

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History

More by Thomas Pynchon

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

Thomas Pynchon

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“It was one of those great iron afternoons in London: the yellow sun being teased apart by a thoasand chimneys breathing, fawning upward without shame. This smoke is more than the day’s breath, more than dark strength--it is an imperial presence that lives and moves. People were crossing the streets and squares, going everywhere. Busses were grinding off, hundreds of…

Thomas Pynchon

“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, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving only the clear way…

Thomas Pynchon

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

Thomas Pynchon

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“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 flame, taken clear beyond greed, real-estate speculating, local politics--instead of which, here was this weeping widow, some one-woman grievance committee in black, who would go on and save up and lovlingly record and mercilessly begrudge every…

Thomas Pynchon

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

Thomas Pynchon

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“Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed…

Thomas Pynchon

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

Thomas Pynchon

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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 . . . it was the equinox . . . green spring equal nights . . . canyons are opening up, at the bottoms are steaming fumaroles, steaming the tropical life there like greens in a pot, rank, dope-perfume, a…

Thomas Pynchon

“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 at its edges, and further in the brown and gold clouds... Then, suddenly, night: The empty rocking chair lit staring chalk blue by--is it the moon, or some other light in the sky? just the hard…

Thomas Pynchon

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

Thomas Pynchon

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“Lovely morning, World War Two.”

Thomas Pynchon

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Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat…

Simon Schama

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It is said that history turns on small hinges. A human career, too, results from an accumulating series of decisions about large and small…

Norman Vincent Peale

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The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records…

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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In the entire history of the universe, let alone in your own history, there has never been another day just like today, and there will never be another just like it again. Today is the point to which all your yesterdays have been leading since the hour of your birth. It is the point from which all your tomorrows will…

Frederick Buechner

The NBA is my history.

Penny Hardaway

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History has often showed us the strength of the forces that are unleashed by the yearning for freedom. It moved people to overcome their fears and openly confront dictators such as in East Germany and Eastern Europe about 22 years ago... The yearning for freedom cannot be contained by walls for long. It was this yearning that brought down the…

Angela Merkel

We find few historians who have been diligent enough in their search for truth; it is their common method to take on trust what…

John Dryden

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What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end.

Jean Cocteau

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Things live and die, and then someone processes them into edible portions. This is a complete telling of the story, 'Food.' The basic plot…

David Fahrenthold

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History is a certain way, but you just change the point of view a little bit, and you discover a whole new side of…

Allison Schroeder

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We're at a point in history were we have to become a part of the neighborhood of inhabited planets, like a neighborhood of a community, which we have not even acknowledged that that community exists up until this point.

Edgar Mitchell