Quotes from Don DeLillo

She looked past the bowl into a space inside her head that was also here in front of her.

When the phone rang she did not look at it the way they do in the movies. Real people don't look at ringing phones.

Together, as doctor and patient, we can do things that neither of us could do separately. There is not enough emphasis on prevention. An ounce of prevention, goes the saying. Is this a proverb or a maxim? Surely professor can tell us.

He is saying terror is what we use to give our people their place in the world. What used to be achieved through work, we gain through terror. Terror makes the new future possible. All men one man. Men live in history as never before. He is saying we make and change history minute by minute. History is not the book or the human memory. We do history in the morning and change it after lunch.

I think it's a mistake to lose one's sense of death, even one's fear of death. Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit." I

In the world today everything is shared. What kind of misery is it that can't be shared?

She cleaned it up now. She didn't wait for later. There was something in the moment that she needed to keep.

Because smoke rolled out of the hollows in the wooded hills and the ferns were burnt brown by time. There was a sternness of judgment in the barrens, shades of flamed earth under darkish skies, and in the boulders sea-strewn at the edge of the pine woods, an old stony temper, a rigor of oath-taking and obduracy.

We're steeped in gruesomely humorous ambiguity, a spectacle of ridiculous people doing awful things to total fools.

To know and not to act is not to know

Forse in quella metropoli la folla era davvero essenziale all'individuo, perché senza di essa non c'era nulla contro cui rivolgere la propria rabbia, mancava l'eco del proprio dolore, si dissolveva ogni prova concreta dell'esistenza di persone ancora più sole al mondo.

I like clearing my arm from the folds of the garment to look at my watch. The simple act of checking the time is transformed by this flourish. Decorative gestures add romance to a life.

That's my argument exactly. Fangs. Snakebite. Fifty thousand people a year die of snakebite. It was on television last night." "Everything was on television last night," Orest said. I admired the reply.

my arms on the cinder track. Kids came running our way, thirty girls in bright shorts, an improbable bobbing mass. The eager breathing, the overlapping rhythms of their footfalls. Sometimes I think our love is inexperienced. The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future. Simple things are doomed, or is that a superstition? We watched

Sometimes I think our love is inexperienced. The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.

Où habitez vous ? - Dans le cÅ"ur des hommes, répondit Sullivan.

I'll tell you what it means, these orbiting sensors that can hear us in our beds. It means the end of loyalty. The more complex the systems, the less conviction in people. Conviction will be drained out of us. Devices will drain us, make us vague and pliant

Murray said, "I don't trust anybody's nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.

Right. We all fear death to some extent. Those who claim otherwise are lying to themselves. Shallow people." "People with their nicknames on their license plates.

Watching children sleep makes me feel devout, part of a spiritual system. It is the closest I can come to God. If there is a secular equivalent of standing in a great spired cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystical light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be watching children in their little bedrooms fast asleep. Girls especially.

DEPARTMENT HEADS wear academic robes at the College-on-the-Hill. Not grand sweeping full-length affairs but sleeveless tunics puckered at the shoulders. I like the idea. I like clearing my arm from the folds of the garment to look at my watch. The simple act of checking the time is transformed by this flourish. Decorative gestures add romance to a life.

Abbiamo bisogno di sapere cose che gli altri non sanno. È quello che nessuno sa di te che ti permette di conoscerti.

He drank, gambled, drove his car down embankments, got fired, quit, retired, traveled in disguise to Coaltown where he paid a woman to speak Swedish to him as they screwed. It was the Swedish that enrage Babette, either that or his need to confess it, and she hit out at him - hit out with the backs of her hands, with her elbows and wrists. Old loves, old fears.

The blank expanse is more powerful than you think.