Quotes from Don DeLillo

She is the kind of child who feels a protective tenderness toward her own beginnings. It is part of her strategy in a world of displacements to make every effort to restore and preserve, keep things together for their value as remembering objects, a way of fastening herself to a life.

He thought of firing a shot into the lock for the sheer cinematic stupidity of the gesture.

You are sure that you are right but you don't want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools.

All that incoherence. Selection, election, option, alternative. All behind him now. Codes and formats. Courses of action. Values, bias, predilection. Choice is a subtle form of disease.

She thought she understood the tourists. You travel somewhere not for museums and sunsets but for ruins, bombed-out terrain, for the moss-grown memory of war and torture.

What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous.' 'And the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art.

Rocks are, but they do not exist.' After a pause I said, "I came across this statement when I was in college and forgot it until very recently. 'Man alone exists. Rocks are, but they do not exist. Trees are, but they do not exist. Horses are, but they do not exist.'

Maybe that was the answer I needed, the one route back. So simple. To decide to love the age.

The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings.

People getting older become more fond of objects. I think this is true. Particular things. A leather-bound book, a piece of furniture, a photograph, a painting, the frame that holds the painting. These things make the past seem permanent. A baseball signed by a famous player, long dead. A simple coffee mug. Things we trust. They tell an important story. A person's life, all those who entered and left, there's a depth, a richness.

News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before—what? I don't know. But you're smart to trap us in your camera before we disappear.

What was there to say? It was a matter of silences, not words.

Miracles share the landscape with death.

We yell and scold as a way of paying homage to each other's views. This is the burden of friendship between extremely high-strung individuals.

Is this a mild winter or a harsh winter?

It just means you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that.

All this optimism, all this booming and soaring. Things happen like bang. This and that simultaneous. I put out my hand and what do I feel? I know there's a thousand things you analyze every ten minutes. Patterns, ratios, indexes, whole maps of information. I love information. This is our sweetness and light. It's a fuckall wonder. And we have meaning in the world. People eat and sleep in the shadow of what we do. But at the same time, what?

A band played live Muzak.

L'azione è verità, e la verità vacilla quando la guerra finisce e gli abitanti del villaggio sono liberi di tornare ai loro campi. Sopravviviamo, e siamo nuovamente sconfitti.

Only shallow people insist on disbelief. You and I know better. We understand how reality is invented. A person sits in a room and thinks a thought and it bleeds out into the world. Every thought is permitted. And there's no longer a moral or spatial distinction between thinking and acting.

He has abandoned his life to understanding that moment in Dallas, the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century.

Take the leap, they said. Live the billionaire's myth of immortality. And why not now, I thought. What else was there for Ross to acquire? Give the futurists their blood money and they will make it possible for you to live forever. The pod would be his final shrine of entitlement.

This sentiment was expressed not so much in words and actions as in terrible and articulate sounds

There was one thing more he wanted from this funeral. He wanted to see the hearse pass by again, the body tilted for viewing, a digital corpse, a loop, a replication. It did not seem right that the hearse had come and gone. He wanted it to reappear at intervals, proud body open to the night, to replenish the sorrow and wonder of the crowd.