Quotes from Don DeLillo

Grass: I live in a great steel tower that reflects the blazing sun. People catch fire just walking by. The more bodies that pile up around you, the greater your equity, the stronger your power, the longer you live. This is the point of living in a high rise. To see the bodies pile up at sunset, the nostalgic hour, the hour of summing up, stirring the cocktails, feeling the great tower sway in the hot winds.

We learn nothing from the stereotypes around us, not even that we're all the same.

No, no, no, no. Who are you? What is this? Don't leave. They're leaving. They've left.

Tutto dovrebbe essere qualcosa. Ma non lo è mai. È la natura dell'esistenza.

You don't know the connection? You don't know that every privilege in your life and every thought in your mind depends on the ability of the two great powers to hang a threat over the planet?

BUDGE (muffled) No,no,nono. NURSE BAKER I understand what you're trying to say. BUDGE A hideous scream. NURSE BAKER Exactly. BUDGE A cry of desperation. NURSE BAKER Perfect. BUDGE A strangled sob. A plea torn from my throat. What sound can I make to convince you I'm not the one you want? A disconsolate sigh? Maybe that's what you want to hear. The smallest human moan imaginable. A whisper in a corner of an unlit room, with curtains blowing in the wind. NURSE BAKER What could be more touching?

I have become an enigma to myself. So said Saint Augustine. And herein lies my sickness.

The ruins stood above the hissing traffic like some monument to doomed expectations.

Nei miei sogni scorrevano fiumi e peccati, occhi sbarrati di volti sommersi. Mi risvegliai nel silenzio e nel gelo, sotto l'occhio accusatore dei riflettori ad arco. La città traboccava di persone in cerca dell'uomo o della donna in grado di salvarle. Puzzavo di sudore freddo, alcol e paura. Il loft mi sembrava sconfinato, un'immagine ripescata dal fondo sabbioso di un sogno.

How do we stand with others when the things that separate us are imposed at birth, when the separation haunts us and follows us day and night?

Some good-bad nights I spent, loving my self-hatred.

That's what it all comes down to in the end. A person spends his life saying good-bye to other people. How does he say good-bye to himself?

There's a dolphin's brain in my in-box but come see me in forty-eight hours.

In the middle of it all is Hitler, of course. He was on again last night. He's always on. We couldn't have television without him.

Is it better to commit evil and attempt to balance it with an exalted act than to live a resolutely neutral life?

and it made his heart shake to hear these things in the street or bus or dime store, the uninventable poetry, inside the pain, of what people say.

This was New York. Every living breathing genotype entered his cab at some point, day or night. And if this was an inflated notion, that was New York as well.

This spot was so close to perfect we would not even want to tell ourselves how lucky we were, having been delivered to it. The best of new places had to be protected from our own cries of delight. We would hold the words for weeks or months, for the soft evening when a stray remark would set us to recollecting. I guess we believed, together, that the wrong voice can obliterate a landscape.

It takes centuries to invent the primitive.

Poco tempo fa sono andato a pranzo con un amico. Si è messo a piangere. Voleva costruirsi una barca e salpare per la Tasmania. Io gli ho riso in faccia. Una settimana dopo gli è venuta un'emorragia cerebrale. Non siamo capaci di imparare niente dagli stereotipi che ci circondano, neppure che siamo tutti uguali.

He liked to mingle with shopping mall crowds. "I'm counting on you to tell me, Jack." "Tell you what?" "You're the only person I know that's educated enough to give me the answer." "The answer to what?" "Were people this dumb before television?" One

When you see a thing like that, a thing that becomes a newsreel, you begin to feel you are a carrier of some solemn scrap of history.

When hell fills up, the dead will walk the streets.

Is cyberspace a thing within the world or is it the other way around? Which contains the other, and how can you tell for sure?