Quotes from Don DeLillo

The nice thing about life is that it's filled with second chances. Quoting Bill.

People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.

She watched him surrender his crisp gaze to a softening, a bright-eyed fear that seemed to tunnel out of childhood. It had the starkness of a last prayer. She worked to get at it. His face was drained and slack, coming into flatness, into black and white, cracked lips and flaring brows, age lines that hinge the chin, old bafflements and regrets.

Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's a settling of grievances between the present and the past.

But I wanted to read it now, I needed it now, even if I knew I'd never finish. I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was

This is the point of Babette.

Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.

The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It's a moment never to be thought of except when it's in the process of unfolding. Maybe this is why it doesn't seem peculiar. It is only me. I don't think about it. I simply live within it and then leave it behind.

She is the kind of of child who feels a protective tenderness towards 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.

The mountains here contained a sense of time, geologic time. They lay in embryo, a process unfolding, or a shriveled dying perhaps. They had the look of naked events.

This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.

Brita said, 'I read at home, I read in hotels, I take a book with me on a twenty-minute trip to the dentist. Then I read in the waiting room.

I know it's thankless to be sensible in the face of someone's primitive distrust.

Maybe it was the hip-sprung way she moved, high-assed and shiny, alert to surfaces, like a character in a B movie soaked in alimony and gin.

The world was a series of fleeting gratifications.

It's like World War III. Everything is white. They'll take our bright colors away and use them in the war effort.

The painted aircraft took on sunlight and pulse. Sweeps of color, bands and spatters, airy washes, the force of saturated light—the whole thing oddly personal, a sense of one painter's hand moved by impulse and afterthought as much as by epic design. I hadn't expected to register such pleasure and sensation. The air was color-scrubbed, coppers and ochers burning off the metal skin of the aircraft to exchange with the framing desert.

There were no laptops or handheld devices in class. Ilgauskas didn't exclude them; we did, sort of, unspokenly. Some of us could barely complete a thought without touch pads or scroll buttons, but we understood that high-speed data systems did not belong here. They were an assault on the environment, which was defined by length, width, and depth, with time drawn out, computed in heartbeats.

lonely-chrome America.

This is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence.

Marriage is something we make from available materials. In this sense it's improvised, it's almost offhand. Maybe this is why we know so little about it. It's too inspired and quicksilver a thing to be clearly understood. Two people make a blur.

The only problem I had was that my whole life was a lesson in the effect of echoes, that I was living in the third person.

I'll tell you what surprises me." "Is it my eyes? Is it my lips?" "It's your cat," he said. "I don't have a cat." "That's what surprises me." "You think I'm a cat person." "I see you with a cat, definitely. There ought to be a cat slipping along the walls.

This is death. I don't want it to tarry awhile so I can write a monograph. I want it to go away for seventy or eighty years.