Quotes from Don DeLillo

Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it's not that you're pretending to be someone else. You're pretending to be exactly who you are. That's the curious thing.

Do you think I'm somehow healthier because I don't know how to repress? Is it possible that constant fear is the natural state of man and that by living close to my fear I am actually doing something heroic, Murray? Do you feel heroic? No. Then you probably aren't.

Is his manhood a sham? Does he love himself or hate himself? I don't think he knows. Or it changes minute to minute. Or the question is so implicit in everything he does that he can't get outside it to answer

She wanted this only, to snuff out the pulse of the shaky faith she'd held for much of her life.

She was taking a round of medications, a mystical wheel, the ritualistic design of the hours and days in tablets and capsules, in colors, shapes and numbers.

You don't believe in heaven? A nun?' 'If you don't, why should I?' 'If you did, maybe I would.' 'If I did, you would not have to.

Reality doesn't happen until you analyze the dots.

What people discard could make a nation

This is what long journeys are for. To see what's back behind you, lengthen the view, find the patterns, know the people, consider the significance of one matter or another and then curse yourself or bless yourself or tell yourself, in my father's situation, that you'll have a chance to do it all over again, with variations.

I thought of women in other places, streets and boulevards in major cities, wind blowing, a woman's skirt lifting in the breeze, the way the wind tenses the skirt, giving shape to the legs, making the skirt dip between the legs, revealing knees and thighs. Were these my father's thoughts or mine?

It was amazing how often kind-looking people turned out to be crazy. He wondered gravely whether things had reached such bad state that only crazy people attempted commonplace acts of kindness, that the crazy and the kind were one and the same.

I don't know whether to feel good or bad about learning that my experience is widely shared.' 'Feel bad,' he said.

If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought, he said, the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.

Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.

A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city. All the guiding principles that might flow from a center of ideas and cultural energies are regarded as corrupt, one or another kind of pornography. This is how it is with towns.

I am the false character that follows the name around.

People get bitten. But I won't.' I found myself saying, 'You will, you will. These snakes don't know you find death inconceivable. They don't know you're young and strong and you think death applies to everyone but you. They will bite you and you will die.

When Lee has a certain look on his face, eyes kind of amused, mouth small and tight, he finds himself thinking of his father. He believes it is a look his father may have used. It feels like his father. A curious sensation, the look coming upon him, taking hold in an unmistakable way, and then his old man is here, eerie and forceful and whole, a meeting across worlds.

At breakfast, Babette read all our horoscopes aloud, using her storytelling voice. I tried not to listen when she got to mine, although I think I wanted to listen, I think I sought some clues.

Devices make us pliant. We want to please them. The machine was his only hope of deliverance after what he'd done, what he'd loosed into the crowd. A way out of death.

Like I'm a person and you're a person, which gives you the right to kill me.

That's great. Tell me about it. I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography. The beginning of the end.