Quotes from Don DeLillo

We walked under a bright banner announcing a raffle to raise money for some incurable disease. The wording seemed to indicate that the winner would get the disease.

You've said good-by to everyone but yourself. How does a person say good-bye to himself? It's a juicy existential dilemma.

But it will definitely come. Maybe now, maybe never.

et pourtant cela l'incitait à explorer tous les musées et toutes les galeries d'art de la ville, et à consacrer toutes ses vacances et presque tout son argent à aller farfouiller dans les abbayes et les châteaux d'Europe, toutes ces poubelles à touristes où patrouillent des gardiens qui ont l'air d'avoir violé leurs propres filles.

I barely forget the times I had in this room, he said.

Peace of mind in a profit-oriented context.

watched the coffee bubble up through the center tube and perforated basket into the small pale globe. A marvelous and sad invention, so roundabout, ingenious, human. It was like a philosophical argument rendered in terms of the things of the world—water, metal, brown beans. I had never looked at coffee before.

dreams (the waste material of premonitions).

Some people are scared by the sunsets, some determined to be elated, but most of us don't know how to feel, are ready to go either way.

This question comes up from time to time, like where are the car keys. It ends a sentence, prolongs a glance between us. I wonder if the thought itself is part of the nature of physical love, a reverse Darwinism that awards sadness and fear to the survivor. Or is it some inert element in the air we breathe, a rare thing like neon, with a melting point, an atomic weight?

She wanted to create her future, not enter a state already shaped to her outline.

Sleet turned into snow, and snow turned into rain.

Living defensively is the central theme of our age. How else can we live? Biologically we've instructed ourselves in the deepest way possible that living in a defensive manner is the only way we'll survive, both in theme and fact.

There is a piece of Chinese wisdom," she said. "To know and not to act is not to know.

I liked to watch Orest eat. He inhaled food according to aerodynamic principles.

Legwarmers lend a note of paramilitary poise, a hint of archaic warriorhood.

Let's think about the billowing cloud. Just a little bit, okay? It could be dangerous." "Everything in tank cars is dangerous. But the effects are mainly long-range and all we have to do is stay out of the way." "Let's just be sure to keep it in the back of our mind," she said, getting up to smash an ice tray repeatedly on the rim of the sink, dislodging the cubes in groups of two and three.

They're not calling it the feathery plume anymore," he said, not meeting my eyes, as if to spare himself the pain of my embarrassment. "I already knew that." "They're calling it the black billowing cloud." "Good." "Why is that good?" "It means they're looking the thing more or less squarely in the eye. They're on top of the situation.

She lived just three blocks away, in a faded brick building whose limitations and malfunctions she'd come to understand as the texture of her life, to be distinguished from a normal day's complaints.

This is all happening in the future. This future, this instant. If you can't absorb this idea, best go home now." I

The golden age is early infancy. Soon after this the corruption of the erotic instinct takes place. In a very short time everything falls apart. The solidarity of opposites is completely shattered. Before you've learned to put two words together, you are mired in an existence full of essential dichotomies.

People seemed to depend on his cheerfulness. The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.

vomiting, shortness of breath, like they said before." "What does it cause?" "Heart palpitations and a sense of déjà vu." "Déjà vu?" "It affects the false part of the human memory or whatever. That's not all. They're not calling it the black billowing cloud anymore." "What are they calling it?" He looked at me carefully. "The airborne toxic event.

The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What