Quotes from Don DeLillo

What were we like then in that time and space, unburdened of the weight of outer sound? We were angels harboring each other in the notion of desirelessness, dazed in our acquiescence to the drift through subatomic matter. The love of minds should last beyond lives. Maybe it does, each mind a dice-toss of neutron stars, invisible except to theory, pulling at cold space to find its lover.

I'm still sad, but you've given my sadness a richness and depth it has never known before.

In other words if I give up now I'll almost surely give up in the more important contests of the future." "That's it exactly, Gary." "I'm giving up," I said.

Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.

We're not here to capture an image. We're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura.

So you're saying, Jack, that death would be just as threatening even if you'd accomplished all you'd ever hoped to accomplish in your life and work.' 'Are you crazy? Of course. That's an elitist idea. Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries hw would like to bag?' 'Well said.' 'This is death. I don't want it to tarry awhile to I can write a monograph. I want it to go way for seventy or eighty years.

Only the fiercest risks make existence possible.

It was like a class project in the structure of reality.

He'll get around to fixing it," Murray said, as we set out on foot in the direction of Elm. "He fixes everything eventually. He's very good with all those little tools and fixtures and devices that people in cities never know the names of. The names of these things are only known in outlying communities, small towns and rural areas.

It was these secondary levels of life, these extrasensory flashes and floating nuances of being, these pockets of rapport forming unexpectedly, that made me believe we were a magic act, adults and children together, sharing unaccountable things.

What people look for in a dying friend is a stubborn kind of gravel-voiced nobility, a refusal to give in, with moments of indomitable humor.

A couple of sportsmen taking their ease.

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosions, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves what it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

What do you think the afterlife is, a body of facts just waiting to be uncovered? Do you think the U.S. Air Force is secretly gathering data on the afterlife and keeping it under wraps because we're not mature enough to accept the findings? The findings would cause a panic? No. I'll tell you what the afterlife is. it's a sweet and terribly touching idea. You can take it or leave it.

Ask yourself what it is you want more, to ease your ancient fear or to revenge your childish dopey injured male pride." I

We have to boil our water," Steffie said. "Why?" "It said on the radio." "They're always saying boil your water," Babette said. "It's the new thing, like turn your wheel in the direction of the skid. Here comes Wilder now. I guess we can eat.

The Chief of Student Welcoming writes that the school was created exclusively for youths of the underprivileged countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Lee wonders how they can think he is privileged. It is part of the general stupidity about life in the U.S.

Me doy cuenta ahora de que el primer día apenas llegué a mirar. Creía estar mirando, pero solo estaba percibiendo un mero barrunto de lo que hay en estos cuadros. Ahora es cuando estoy empezando a mirar.

He comes floating down out of the endless pale, struck simultaneously by the beauty of the earth and a need to ask forgiveness. He is a stranger, in a mask, falling.

Baba, I am the one in this family who is obsessed by death. I have always been the one.

I moonlight except that there's nothing I'm moonlighting from. Moonlight is all that's out there.

These were the things that built the world. Not to know or care about them was a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender, of species. What could be more useless than a man who couldn't fix a dripping faucet—fundamentally useless, dead to history, to the messages in his genes? I wasn't sure I disagreed.

Even after you think you've seen all the ways violence can surprise a man, along comes something you never imagined.

My name is Viverrine Gentian. Who are you?" "You said you knew." "And so I do," she said. "I was simply wondering if we agreed." "What's that book?" "It's a story called Somnium. A beautiful and extremely rare book. Written in Latin with a smidgen of Hebrew and Greek.