Although he has carefully avoided scrutiny from the public over his career that has spanned six decades, Thomas Pynchon emerged on the Literary Scene in America in 1959 with the publishing his first short story "Small Rain" in The Cornell Writer. However, the native of Glen Clove, Long Island, New York would gain renown as a novelist four years after graduating from Cornell with his debut novel "V." Nominated for a National Book Award and receiving The William Faulkner Foundation Award for the best debut novel, Pynchon is perhaps currently, and best remembered for "Gravity's Rainbow" -- a book dubbed by critics and scholars as the 'Great American Novel' -- exclusive praise it shares with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" and Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

Dubbed as a mathematician of prose for his calculating, but risky utilization of linguistics and diction, Pynchon's examination of racism and imperialism, coupled with his seamless ability to blend high culture -- philosophical, sociological, and theological ideas -- with low culture -- comic books, pulp fiction, popular films, conspiracy theories, and paranoia -- have allowed to become one of the most influential icons in the literary postmodernism movement along with his colleague, the much revered Don DeLillo. Without further ado, here are five of the most incisive lines delivered by the American Literature's greatest arithmetic mastermind:

Although Thomas Pynchon continues to drive the public conscious mad with his infallible elusiveness to preserve an anchoret lifestyle, his books continue to fill the shelves of libraries and bookstores -- to help make sense of the insanity he has not only left behind but exposed. In America, and ourselves. Not so we might abandon reason, but to discover why it was the reason we chose to abandon. Abandoned because it was we who abandoned. Relinquished ourselves so there might be a "we". Not realizing that we can only be when we chose to be ourselves. In America, and around the world.