Quotes from Don DeLillo

it referred to intense mental suffering, deep remorse, extreme anguish, acute sorrow and the like.

It is the neon epic of Saturday night.

Once you start a file, Delphine, it's just a matter of time before the material comes pouring in. Notes, lists, photos, rumors. Every bit and piece and whisper in the world that doesn't have a life until someone comes along to collect it. It's all been waiting just for you.

Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowledge, wrote it painstakingly down. These systems collect and process. All the secret knowledge of the world.

Once you live in the street, there's nothing but the street.

Te lo ricordi com'era, sudare sotto le coperte, da bambini? La febbre è una cosa segreta. È come cadere in un buco dove nessuno può seguirti, ma non provi né paura né dolore perché non ti senti neanche te stesso. Io adoro raggomitolarmi nel sudore.

She used to say to him, If people knew what I was thinking they would put me away forever. But they would put us all away, he said. They have put us away. we are put away for our thoughts, one way or another. We have put ourselves away, he said.

Reality doesn't happen until you analyze the dots

I think of kids. It makes me feel selfish, to be so wary of having a family. Never mind do I have a job or not. I'll have a job soon, a good one. That's not it. I'm in awe of raising, basically, someone so tiny and soft.

Weede si alzò in piedi per un secondo e piegò leggermente le ginocchia - come faceva sempre mio padre quando le mutande gli si incagliavano in qualche anfratto delle regioni inguinali, spiegando a me bambino che quel gesto era l'unica alternativa civile al disincagliamento manuale, sport preferito di emarginati e pazzi.

Quel po' di senso di colpa che provavo dipendeva dall'immagine di Jennifer sola e umiliata, non dal banale tradimento di Meredith. Per Jennifer io rimanevo un enigma. Rifiutavo di concederle la minima percezione di me, e la ragione posso solo immaginarla: avevo un bisogno disperato di ogni minima briciola del mio ego per vincere la paura di svanire io stesso.

Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.

In the Times every morning, wasn't it a fact that the obits and the ad column tended to appear on facing pages?

Only absences were fully shared.

Talent is everything; sanity is nothing.

Catastrophe is our bedtime story.

Six point nine seconds of heat and light. Let's call a meeting to analyze the blur. Let's devote our lives to understanding this moment, separating the elements of each crowded second. We will build theories that gleam like jade idols, intriguing systems of assumption, four-faced, graceful. We will follow the bullet trajectories backwards to the lives that occupy the shadows, actual men who moan in their dreams.

I was not a happy runner. I did it to stay interested in my body, to stay informed, and to set up clear lines of endeavor, a standard to meet, a limit to stay within. I was just enough of a puritan to think there must be some virtue in rigorous things, although I was careful not to overdo it. I never wore the clothes. the shorts, tank top, high socks. Just running shoes and a lightweight shirt and jeans. I ran disguised as an ordinary person.

We're not gonna die We're not gonna die We're not gonna die, leading them in a chant, a mantra that was joyful and mock joyful at the same time because this is New York, New York and we want it both ways.

Aren't you going too far?" "I'm from New York.

History is the angle at which realities meet.

To men at this remove, it is as though things exist in their particular physical form in order to reveal the hidden simplicity of some powerful mathematical truth.

Exile in a real place, a place of few bodies and many stones, is just an extension (a packaging) of the other exile, the state of being separated from whatever is left of the center of one's own history

People had hoped to be caught up in something bigger than themselves. They thought it would be a shared crisis. They would feel a sense of shared purpose, shared destiny. Like a snowstorm that blankets a large city – but lasting months, lasting years, carrying everyone along, creating fellow feeling where there was only suspicion and fear. The war would ennoble everything we say and do. What was impersonal would become personal. What was solitary would be shared.