Quotes from Don DeLillo

God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the .45 to even things up.

Every act he performed was self-haunted and synthetic.

She became confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn't working.

You live in a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God.

People weren't saying Oh wow anymore. They were saying No way instead and she wondered if there was something she might learn from this.

I'm not just a college professor. I'm the head of a department. I don't see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That's for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are.

Non chiamai Marion. Provai un senso di solitudine, in mancanza di parole migliori, ma in effetti è la parola giusta, una cosa a cui ho sempre cercato di oppormi e da cui sapevo come uscire, ma talvolta anche questo non bastava, e non la chiamai perché non volevo arrendermi, guardando la notte che scendeva.

slightly older men and women, they had professions and soft slacks with knife pleats and a certain ease of bearing and belonging, the package of attitudes and values known as lifestyle

Their bumper sticker read GUN CONTROL IS MIND CONTROL. In situations like this, you want to stick close to people in right-wing fringe groups.

These were the things that built the world. Not to know or care about them was a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender, of species. What could be more useless than a man who couldn't fix a dripping faucet—fundamentally useless, dead to history, to the messages in his genes? I wasn't sure I disagreed.

Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although I wouldn't say that to a dying man.

She was the one, I decided, who would guide me into the vortex of the cliche.

People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units.

No body knows how to feel and they're checking around for hints.

holes are interesting. there are books about holes.

America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.

We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely.

He'd come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain.

Women have faith in the mechanics of adjustment. A woman knows how to want something. She'll take chances to secure the future.

There was something theatrical about the protest, ingratiating even. . . . There was a shadow of transaction between the demonstrators and the state. The protest was a form of systemic hygiene, purging and lubricating. It attested again, for the ten thousandth time, to the market culture's innovative brilliance, its ability to shape itself to its own flexible ends, absorbing everything around it.

Sometimes it takes an entire morning to outlive a dream, to outwake a dream.

Writing is freedom.

Remember literature, Charlie? It involved getting drunk and getting laid.

The grasp of objects that bind us to some betokening.