Quotes from Don DeLillo

Find someone to push him ever sunward. There's always something you're not supposed to see but it is a condition of growing up that you will see it.

the half-concealed disasters that constitute a life.

Technology is crucial to civilization why? Because it helps us make our fate. We don't need God or miracles or the flight of the bumble bee. But it is also crouched and undecidable. It can go either way.

He imagines they are uniformly smiling, showing the face they squeeze out with the toothpaste every morning.

Lee Oswald] saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history, he and his mother, locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law. The books made him part of something. Something led up to his presence in this room, in this particular skin, and something would follow. Men in small rooms. Men reading and waiting, struggling with secret and feverish ideas.

If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.

Crowds, Scott said. People trudging along wide streets, pushing carts or riding bikes, crowd after crowd in the long lens of the camera so they seem even closer together than they really are, totally jampacked, and I think of how they merge with the future, how the future makes room for the non-achiever, the trudger, the nonagressor, the nonindividual. Totally calm in the long lens, crowd on top of crowd, pedaling, trudging, faceless, sort of surviving nicely.

No. Your crime has no conscience. You haven't been driven to do it by some oppressive social force. How I hate to be reasonable. You're not against the rich. Nobody's against the rich. Everybody's ten seconds from being rich. Or so everybody thought. No. Your crime is in your head. Another fool shooting up a diner because because

Crowds came to form a shield against their own dying. To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone.

All these people formed by language and climate and popular songs and breakfast foods and the jokes they tell and the cars they drive have never had anything in common so much as this, that they are sitting in the furrow of destruction.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

But that's why you built the towers, isn't it? Weren't the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is clear. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It's a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down.

Isn't death a blessing? Doesn't it define the value of our lives, minute to minute, year to year?

You understand it's not a matter of strategy. I'm not talking about secrets or deceptions. I'm talking about being yourself. If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

Some people don't believe in God but they color eggs at Easter just to change the pattern of their days.

Mainly we looked at people in other cars, trying to work out from their faces how frightened we should be.

Silvery dancing strands that seemed the pure play of light, light as evanescent news, ideas borne on light.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers' plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children's games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.

We commit our crimes at night and reveal ourselves in the high noon of studio lights.

We're a silver gleaming death machine!

When it rains out, it also rains in.

I'm a world citizen with a New York set of balls.

It's the things we forget about that tell us who we are.

And I knew with total certainty that a protection factor of fifteen was the highest level of sunblock scientifically possible. Now they were selling me a thirty.