History, the proverb says

History, the proverb says is made at night. The European civil servant normally sleeps at night. What waits in his IN basket to confront him at nine in the morning is history. He doesn’t fight it, he tries to coexist with it.

-Thomas Pynchon, in the novel V (p. 215, Bantam Windstone paperback edition, 1963)

He had decided

He had decided a 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 homogenous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing its world in only three.

Hence the success or failure of any diplomatic issue must vary directly with the degree of rapport achieved by the team confronting it.

-Thomas Pynchon, in the novel V (p. 174, Bantam Windstone paperback edition, 1963)

Perhaps history this century

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 the 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, compartemented off into sinuous cycles each of which 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 ’30s, the curious fashions of the ’20s, the peculiar moral habits our grandparents.

We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are connected into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of continous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.

-Thomas Pynchon, in the novel V (p. 198, Bantam Windstone paperback edition, 1963)

If he’d been the type

If he’d been the type who evolves theories of political history for his own amusement, he might have said all political events: wars, governments and uprisings, have the desire to get laid as their roots; because history unfolds according to economic forces and the only reason anybody wants to get rich is so he can get laid steadily, with whomever he chooses.

-Thomas Pynchon, in the novel V (p. 198, Bantam Windstone paperback edition, 1963)