Quotes from Don DeLillo

A sports announcer said: 'They're not booing - they're saying, Bruce, Bruce.

We passed my street and walked up the hill to the campus. "Who's your doctor?" "Chakravarty," I said. "Is he good?" "How would I know?" "My shoulder separates. An old sexual injury.

The life of a star of this type and magnitude. Isn't the life structured to cut you down early? This is the point, isn't it? There are rules, guidelines. If you don't have the grace and wit to die early, you are forced to vanish, to hide as if in shame and apology.

Peace of mind, purpose, true fellowship.

This is how I thought of it. An intuitive link, a reciprocal, one number related to another in such a way that when multiplied together, day or night, their product is one.

At dinner Denise kept getting up and walking in small stiff rapid strides to the toilet off the hall, a hand clapped to her mouth. We paused in odd moments of chewing or salt-sprinkling to hear her retch incompletely. Heinrich told her she was showing outdated symptoms

Her tiny piping voice bounced down to be from a hollow ball in geosynchronous orbit.

This is why California is so important. We not only enjoy seeing them punished for their relaxed life-style and progressive social ideas but we know we're not missing anything. The cameras are right there. They're standing by. Nothing terrible escapes their scrutiny.

This is what long journeys are for. To see what's back behind you, lengthen the view, find the patterns, know the people, consider the significance of one matter or another and then curse yourself or bless yourself or tell yourself, in my father's situation, that you'll have a chance to do it all over again, with variations. He

At first they said skin irritation and sweaty palms. But now they say nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath." "This is human nausea we're talking about. Not rats." "Not rats," he said. I gave him the binoculars. "Well it won't come this way." "How do you know?" he said. "I just know. It's perfectly calm and still today. And when there's a wind at this time of year, it blows that way, not this way.

I get a little restless. Who doesn't?' 'Toss and turn?' 'Toss,' I said. 'Good.' 'Good.

What if it blows this way?" "It won't." "Just this one time." "It won't. Why should it?" He paused a beat and said in a flat tone, "They just closed part of the interstate." "They would want to do that, of course." "Why?" "They just would. A sensible precaution. A way to facilitate movement of service vehicles and such. Any number of reasons that have nothing to do with wind or wind direction.

Steffie said, "Can you see the feathery plume from the attic window?" "It's not a plume." "But will we have to leave our homes?

Have you recently been feeling tired?' 'What do people usually say?' 'Mild fatigue is a popular answer.' 'I could say exactly that and be convinced in my own mind it's a fair and accurate description.

Of course not." "How do you know?" "I just know." "Remember how we couldn't go to school?" "That was inside. This is outside." We heard police sirens blowing. I watched Steffie's lips form the sequence: wow wow wow wow. She smiled in a certain way when she saw me watching, as though gently startled out of some absentminded pleasure. Denise walked in, rubbing her hands on her jeans.

The tremendous bruising force of history, sometimes random, often without logic or resolution, may produce a work of fiction that leans for its effectiveness on structure and pattern, on a detailed unraveling of some old perplexity or anxiety, some lingering confusion out there, in three dimensions, where the blood is thick and real but the gunshots can go uncounted.

the weather center outside Glassboro. They're not calling it a feathery plume anymore." "What are they calling it?" "A black billowing cloud." "That's a little more accurate, which means they're coming

What can it do in terms of worst-case scenario contingencies?' 'Cause a person to die.' 'Speak English for God's sake. I despise this modern jargon.

These are the soporifics of normalcy, my days in middling drift.

This is why we are here. A tiny minority. To embody old things, old beliefs. The devil, the angels, heaven, hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse." "Pretend?" "Of course pretend. Do you think we are stupid? Get out from here." "You don't believe in heaven? A nun?" "If you don't, why should I?" "If you did, maybe I would." "If I did, you would not have to.

Their true lives lie below, even now beginning to reassemble themselves, calling this very flesh out of the air, in mail waiting to be opened, in telephones ringing and paper work on office desks, in the chance utterance of a name.

The look was one of solemn compassion. It was a look I did not necessarily trust, believing it had little to do with pity or love or sadness. I recognized it in fact as something else completely. The adolescent female's tenderest form of condescension.

They called and waved, were approaching the early phases of uncontrollable terror when a passing motorist, as such people are called, alertly pulled over, got out of the car, skidded down the embankment and lifted the boy from the murky shallows, holding him aloft for the clamoring elders to see.

No weakening of the spirit. 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.