Quotes from Don DeLillo

To Charles it was a mark of one's respect for other cultures to know the terms of local abuse and the words for sex acts and natural wastes.

No sense of the irony of human existence, that we are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

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.

Fuck you. Show some amazement.

When someone asks whether they have bourbon, the bartender says smugly, 'Yes, of course, James Beam, very good.' Ã¢â'¬Â "James Beam. That is

The long soft life is what I feel I'm settling into and the only question is how deadly it will turn out to be. But

this is the woman you are inside the life. looking at you, what? i'm more excited than i've been since the first burning nights of adolescent frenzy. excited and confused. i look at you and feel an erection stirring even as the situation argues strenuously against it. _Eric Packer

it can't afford to be hard. it won't allow itself psychologically.

Everything that has happened drives me in that direction, theoretically. But I don't feel reduced by my abstinence, as I did in the past. The craving is gone and maybe this is what reduces me. •

Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach? Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you.

But it can't be true that he drifts from one reality to another, independent of the logic of time. This is not possible. You are made out of time. This is the force that tells you who you are. Close your eyes and feel it. It is time that defines your existence.

Rain turned to sleet, sleet to snow.

He had ambitions on my behalf and more or less at my expense. This is the custom among men who have failed to be heroes; their sons must prove that the seed was not impoverished.

This is the custom among men who have failed to be heroes; their sons must prove that the seed was not impoverished

Pause for a moment, you wretched weakling, and take stock of yourself.

a life terrain, might itself be the object of a person's study and wonder for years. A cosmology against the void.

It's the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent.

You don't think of the tape as boring or interesting. It is crude, it is blunt, it is relentless. It is the jostled part of your mind, the film that runs through your hotel brain under all the thoughts you know you're thinking.

He said, The word for moonlight is moonlight. This made her happy. It was logically complex and oddly moving and circularly beautiful and true - or maybe not so circular but straight as straight can be.

What's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

In the countryside he heard horns and drums and followed the sound to a temple of granite and marble set in a compound that included shrines and incense stalls, people squatting against the walls, beggars, touts, flower-sellers, those who watch over your shoes for a couple of weightless coins.

They seemed to shine together at the center of things. They made things theirs. A certain bench in the park, near the chess players, ordinary things, not unusual in any way.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers' plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children's games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot." Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean?

He was waiting for a man with a knife to come out of a doorway at him. All this time, he told me, he had been trying to steal death from her body. By confronting it himself, he would keep it away from her.