Quotes from Don DeLillo

The shallower our arguments, the more intense we became.

Memory is the faculty of absolution. Men developed memories to ease their disquiet over things they did as men. The deep past is the only innocence and therefore necessary to retain.

I think we ought to have our intercourse now.

If you let me teach you not to end a sentence with a preposition, Edgar thought, I will save your life.

It makes me feel true to the system, knowing that unnecessary risk is integral to the code of urban pathology.

Through history it's the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist?

What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others?

I'll tell you what I long for, the days of disarray, when I didn't give a damn or a fuck or a farthing.

It makes a man feel universal, floating over the continents, seeing the rim of the world, a line as clear as a compass arc, knowing it is just a turning of the bend to Atlantic twilight, to sediment plumes and kelp beds, an island chain glowing in the dusky sea.

Shoes are like people. They adjust to situations.

and the man and the chair went different ways.

Fee-uck, man. This game is still on. I get that sixty-two yet. I get his ass and whip it into shape. Damnright. I get that shitpiss sixty-two and beat his black ass into the ground. He's white, I said. I know he's white. They're all white. Everybody's white. Black fucks.

Someday you'll be a grown-up ... and then your mother will have no one to talk to.

The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become.

I see them in the primitive silkscreen the brain is able to produce, maybe eight inches in front of my closed eyes, miniaturised by time and distance, riddled by visual static, each figure a dancing red ribbon. These are among the people I've tried to know twice, the second time in memory and language. Through them, myself. They are what I've become, in ways I don't understand but which I believe will accrue to a rounded truth, a second life for me as well as for them.

I had to wonder whether this interval had any more spread and breadth than just another sequestered moment, bordered by closed doors.

I want to immerse myself in American magic and dread.

The TV was a rage-making machine, working at him all the time, giving him direction and scope, enlarging him in a sense, filling him with a world rage, a great stalking soreness and rancour.

Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely.

I'm not saying we shouldn't grieve. Just, why don't we put it in God's hands? she said. Why haven't we learned this, after all the evidence of all the dead? We're supposed to believe in God but then why don't we obey the laws of God's universe, which teach us how small we are and where we're all going to end up?

Any curly-haired boy can write windswept ballads. You have to crush people's heads. That's the only way to make those fuckers listen.

heat that rots ambition and stuns the intellect and will.

Why don't you want to be Jewish anymore? I'm tired of the guilt. That enormous nagging historical guilt. What guilt? The guilt of being innocent victims.

Grass: I've invested heavily in blood futures. I have a direct line to the trading floor for polyester blood. There's a heaving mass of men crying out their bids. The blood arrives at the warehouse in the form of double-knit suits. It's the only kind of suit I wear. When I collapse in the street, paramedics rush me to the hospital, liquefy the suit and inject it in my veins.