Quotes from Don DeLillo

If there is a secular equivalent of standing in a great spired Cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystic light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be watching children in their little bedrooms fast asleep. Girls especially.

Jessie was trying to read science fiction but nothing she read so far could begin to match ordinary life on this planet, she said, for sheer unimaginableness.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

A film can be undermined by the person you're seeing it with, there in the dark, a ripple effect of attitude, scene by scene, shot by shot.

It's healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line. I assume you know that, he said.

She was plain except when she laughed. She was someone on the subway. She wore loose skirts and plain shoes and was full-figured and maybe a little clumsy but when she laughed there was a flare in nature, an unfolding of something half hidden and dazzling.

We travel into or away from our photographs.

I move past the scaffolding and walk down the steps, hearing one language after another, rich, harsh, mysterious, strong. This is what we bring to the temple, not prayer or chant or slaughtered rams. Our offering is language.

Everything was on television last night

I'd never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be only human, subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of sadness and loss that made me understand that I was a man expanded by grief.

I like your mother. You have your mother's breasts. Her breasts. Great stand-up tits. he said

It's there in your face, all of it, the way it rarely shows in any face. What do I see? Something lazy, sexy and insatiable.

Any assault on the borders of perception is going to seem rash at first.

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself.

I look at you. I know what you are. You are sloppy-bodied, smelly and wet. A woman who was born to sit trapped in a chair while a man tells her how much she excites him.

It was the kind of day in which you forget words and drop things and wonder what it is you came into the room to get because you are standing here for a reason and you have to tell yourself it is just a question of sooner or later before you remember because you always remember once you are here. The thing is communicated somehow.

My life is either/or. Either I chew regular gum or I chew sugarless gum. Either I chew gum or I smoke. Either I smoke or I gain weight. Either I gain weight or I run up the stadium step.' 'Sounds like a boring life.' 'I hope it lasts forever,' she said.

If this makes me sexier then where are you going?

He knew time and day of week and wondered when such scraps of data would begin to feel disposable.

Ample women do not plan such things. They lack the guile for conspiracies of the body.

People eat and sleep in the shadow of what we do

We're a crowd, a swarm. We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough. The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.

That night, after the movie, driving my father's car along the country roads, I began to wonder how real the landscape truly was, and how much of a dream is a dream.

Self-pity oozed through my soul. I tried to relax and enjoy it.