Quotes from Don DeLillo

Don't we know when a death is passing in the air?

In time I let my head ease back on the top step and I closed my eyes. I was moving into the biblical phase of the afternoon, the peak of my new simplicity. A verity less than eternal had little appeal. I prepared myself to think of night, desert, sorrowful forests, of the moon, the stars, the west wind, baptismal mist and the rich myrrh of harvested earth. Instead I thought of tits.

He was a foreigner here. There was no profit in discontent. He could not apply his bitterness. It was American-made and had no local standing. For the first time he realized what a dangerous thing he'd done, leaving his country. He struggled against this awareness. He hated knowing something he didn't want to know.

A Catholic gets it early. Incense, organ music, ashes on the forehead, wafer on the tongue. The best things shimmer with fear.

we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become.

The skies she retained in memory were dramas of cloud and sea storm, or the electric sheen before summer thunder in the city, always belonging to the energies of sheer weather, of what was out there, air masses, water vapor, westerlies.

Everybody wants to own the end of the world.

A police car went by with its siren going, a rotary slurping noise, it sounded like the blender in their kitchen—she made fruit shakes compulsively that they felt morally bound to drink.

We have a rich literature. But sometimes it's a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We're all one beat away from becoming elevator music.

Her umbrella was useless in the wind. It was the kind of wind-whipped rain that empties the streets of people and makes day and place feel anonymous.

The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now.

There is a thing about the trust of a dog that makes up for a lot of heartache we take in this life.

Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.

Then she took of her panties and handed them to me. I tossed them on the bed and got undressed. I felt a breath of estrangement in the room and thought she might be a voyeur of her own experience, living at an angle to the moment and recording in some state of future-mind. But then she pulled me down, snatched a fistful of hair and pulled me into a kiss, and there was a heat in her, a hungry pulse that resembled a gust of being.

The women kept washing floors. It seemed to be what they did in difficult times. Unvarying things, she saw, must have a deeper value than we know.

There were times when he felt the lure of a submoronic mode of being.

This is the new austerity. he said. Flavorless packaging. It appeals to me. I feel like I'm not only saving money but contributing to some kind of spiritual consensus. It's like World War III. Everything is white. They'll take our bright colors away and use them in the war effort.

The ceiling angled down right over me and I raised my arm and touched it with my fingertips. All children, I thought, should be permitted to sleep in such a room; the child loves nooks and odd angles and is frightened into nightmare by equidistance, by parallel planes which conceal nothing.

People stress the violence. That's the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there's a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There's a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there's a satisfaction to the game that can't be duplicated. There's a harmony.

She missed the autumn weekends at somebody's country house, leaf-fall and touch football, kids tumbling down grassy slopes, leaders and followers, all watched by a pair of tall slender dogs poised on their haunches like figures in myth.

Helpless and fearful people are drawn to magical figures, mythic figures, epic men who intimidate and darkly loom. ... Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death. You thought he would protect you. I understand completely.

Do we have to believe something happened exactly the way it was shown by artists?

We start our lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual.

Sleep was out there somewhere over the curve of the earth.