Quotes from Don DeLillo

Traffic was stopped dead and I nudged the window switch and listened to the blowing horns approach peak volume. We were trapped in our own obsessive clamor.

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream. May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan.

Behind me, his bedroom light went out, brightening the sky, and how queer it seemed, half the heavens coming nearer, all those incandescent masses increasing in number, the stars and constellations, because somebody turns off a light in a house in the desert...

She was transcribing names and phone numbers from an old book to a new one. There were no addresses. Her friends had phone numbers only, a race of people with a seven-bit analog consciousness.

La preghiera è una strategia pratica, la conquista di un vantaggio temporale nei mercati capitali del Peccato e della Remissione.

The desert was clairvoyant, this is what he'd always believed, that the landscape unravels and reveals, it knows future as well as past.

It's a Cadillac all right." "The Rolls-Royce of automobiles," Ottum

Vokspapiret ble skilt fra rullen i et rat-a-tat-forløp, krøp langs den hakkete kanten på esken, og hun hørte det nedover ryggraden, tenkte hun.

Steffie took my hand and we walked past the fruit bins, an area that extended about forty-five yards along one wall. The bins were arranged diagonally and backed my mirrors that people accidentally punched when reaching for fruit in upper rows.

Writing is an organized way of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write them.

All human existence is a trick of light.

Billy couldn't recall ever having seen a blind man laugh

It's hard to be beautiful. You have an obligation to people. You almost become public property. You can lose yourself and get almost mentally disturbed on just the public nature of being beautiful. Don't think I haven't thought about it. You can get completely lost in that whole dumb mess. And anyway who's to say what's beautiful and what's ugly?

What's the point in living if we don't die at the end of it?

She is beginning to think it is possible that all creation is a spurt of blank matter that chances to make an emerald planet here, a dead star there, with random waste between.

There is another kind of belief, a second force, insecure, untrusting, a faith that is spring-fed by the things we fear in the night.

But there are different kinds of death, David. And I prefer that kind, his kind, to the death I've been fighting all my life.

I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American. Your brain has a trillion neurons and every neuron has ten thousand little dendrites. The system of inter-communication is awe-inspiring. It's like a galaxy that you can hold in your hand, only more complex, more mysterious. Why does this make you proud to be an American? The infant's brain develops in response to stimuli. We still lead the world in stimuli.

The question is can you cure the disease before it kills you? Once you set out consciously to cure the disease, as I did even before I knew the word cancer, you run the risk of catching it. Comprende? Whatever you set your mind to, your personal total obsession, this is what kills you. Poetry kills you if you're a poet, and so on. People choose their death whether they know it or not.

Tuition at the College-on-the-Hill is fourteen thousand dollars, Sunday brunch included.

Sometimes I think everything I've done since those years, everything around me in fact, I don't know if you feel this way but everything is vaguely—what—fictitious.

When the going gets tough the tough get going

Whatever you set your mind to, your personal total obsession, this is what kills you. Poetry kills you if you're a poet, and so on. People choose their death whether they know it or not.

I felt the distance and stillness of that sprawled dawn like some endless sky waking inside me, flared against the laughter.