Quotes from Don DeLillo

If Greek and Latin characters are paving stones, Arabic is rain.

The whole country's going to puke blood when they read it.

There was something touching about the fact that Murray was dressed almost totally in corduroy.

I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds.

She was shining a light on us, she was coming into being, endlessly being formed and reformed as the muscles in her face worked at smiling and speaking, as the electronic dots swarmed.

I am advising you in this matter not only as your chief of finance, but as a woman who would still be married to her husbands if they had looked at her the way you have looked at me here today.

I want to eat lunch. You want to eat lunch. We're people in the world. We need to eat and talk.

This makes me feel ritually unclean.

Nothingness is staring you in the face. Utter and permanent oblivion. You will cease to be. To be, Jack. The dier accepts this and dies. The killer, in theory, attempts to defeat his own death by killing others. He buys time, he buys life. - Murray (WN 291)

I realized the place was awash in noise. The toneless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children. And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.

They know him at molecular level. He lives in them like chains of matter that determine who they are.

A surface separates inside from out and belongs no less to one than the other.

You are the happy one. I am the doomed fool.

It is the violent act that makes history and changes everything that came before.

Why are free spirits always so fucking dumb?

One must become a book before one can know what is inside it.

We all know how the thing we secretly fear is not a secret at all but the open and eternal thing that predicts its own recurrence.

If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talking about when we use the word identity has reached an end.

Everything is supposed to be something. But it never is. That's the nature of existence.

This is what love comes down to, things that happen and what we say about them.

But you have to direct yourself out of this thing, not into it. Don't fold up.

It's the kind of human junk that deepens the landscape, makes it sadder and lonelier and places a vague sad subjective regret at the edge of your response—not regret so much as a sense of time's own esthetic, how strange and still and beautiful a chunk of concrete can be, lived in fleetingly and abandoned, the soul of wilderness signed by men and women passing through.

I've bought these peanuts before. They're round, cubical, pock-marked, seamed. Broken peanuts. A lot of dust at the bottom of the jar. But they taste good. Most of all I like the packages themselves. You were right, Jack. This is the last avant-garde. Bold new forms. The power to shock.

Before I fell asleep, eventually, was thinking when I was a small kid how I'd try to imagine the end of the century and what a far-off wonder that was and I'd figure out how old I'd be when the century ended, years, months, days and now look, incredible we're here - we're six years in and I realize I'm the same skinny kid, my life shadowed by his presence, won't step on cracks on the sidewalk, not as superstition but as a test, a discipline, still do it.