Quotes from Don DeLillo

What you see is not what wee se. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

The alphabet is male and female. If you will know the correct order of letters, you make a world, you make creation. This is why they will hide the order. If you will know the combinations, you make all life and death.

I like simple men and complicated women.

He was thinking about automated teller machines. The term was aged and burdened by its own historical memory. It worked at cross-purposes, unable to escape the inferences of fuddled human personnel and jerky moving parts. The term was part of the process that the device was meant to replace. It was anti-futuristic, so cumbrous and mechanical that even the acronym seemed dated.

The Agency was the one subject in his life that could never be exhausted. Central Intelligence. Beryl saw it as the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God.

A sunset is the story of the world's day.

When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear. We're all drawn to remoteness. A hard-to-reach place is necessarily beautiful. Beautiful and a little sacred, maybe. And a person who becomes inaccessible has a grace and wholeness the rest of us envy.

Isolation is not a drawback to those who understand that isolation is the point.

Of course you know. You're brilliant. Everyone says so. What else can they say? I do neurochemistry. No one knows what that is.

Something lurked inside the truth.

In the afternoon I drank Coke and wrote poetry.

When I get real high I can feel the space between sounds.

How language is webbed in the senses. Out of sand-blazed brilliance into quirky minds such as his, into touch, taste and fragrance. He thought he'd linger just a bit longer, let the bath take total hold, ease and alleviate, before he put on clothes and entered the complex boxes where people do their living. Nothing fits the body so well as water.

He liked to talk about the anatomy of racecars, motorcycles, hunting rifles, how things work, and she liked to listen. It was a mark of the distance between them that she listened so eagerly, the perennial miles, the weeks and months

common words of spark and heart.

Then they're always trying to sell you something. Everything is based on forcing people to buy. If you can't buy what they're selling, you're a zero in the system.

Opportunity, adventure, sunsets, dusty death.

El sexo nos descubre. El sexo nos revela como somos. Por eso es tan estremecedor. Nos despoja de toda apariencia.

What do children know? They know who they are, she said, in ways we can't know and they can't tell us.

Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not. [...] To plot, to take aim at something, to shape time and space. This is how we advance the art of human consciousness. (WN 291-2)

Where do you live? In the hearts of men, Sullivan said.

The game doesn't change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life.

But idealists of course are unpredictable. They tend to be the ones who turn bitter overnight, deceived by lies they've told themselves.

Maybe he didn't want that life after all, starting over broke, hailing a cab in a busy intersection filled with jockeying junior executives, arms aloft, bodies smartly spinning to cover every compass point. What did he want that was not posthumous? He stared into space. He understood what was missing, the predatory impulse, the sense of large excitation that drove him through his days, the sheer and reeling need to be.