Quotes from Don DeLillo

How is Hitler? Fine, solid, dependable.

Every bad smell is about us. We make our way through the world and come upon a scene that is medieval-modern, a city of high-rise garbage, the hell reek of every perishable object ever thrown together, and it seems like something we've been carrying all our lives.

Quanti inizi ci vogliono prima che si comincino a vedere le menzogne del proprio entusiasmo?

Is it raining," I said, "or isn't it?

The usual rumors abound of sexual freedom, sexual slavery, drugs, nudity, mind control, poor hygiene, tax evasion, monkey-worship, torture, prolonged and hideous death.

If each of us is the center of his or her existence, Orest seemed intent on enlarging the center, making it everything. Is this what athletes do, occupy the self more fully? It's possible we envy them for a prowess that has little to do with sport. In building toward a danger, they escape it in some deeper sense, the dwell in some angelic scan, able to leap free of everyday dying.

If each of us is the center of his or her existence, Orest seemed intent on enlarging the center, making it everything. Is this what athletes do, occupy the self more fully? It's possible we envy them for a prowess that has little to do with sport. In building toward a danger, they escape it in some deeper sense, they dwell in some angelic scan, able to leap free of everyday dying.

It was an evil thing to consider, allying myself with the barest parts of mass awareness, land policed by the king's linguists, by technicians in death-system control, corporate disease consultants, profiteers of the fetus industry.

But the phenomenon of reputation is a delicate thing. A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.

I want to keep our intentions small and human despite the enormous work we've done and the huge work we have ahead of us and I'm sitting here with a propped foot and talking endlessly about my work when I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.

He and Kennedy were partners. The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history.

It was a period of looks and glances, teeming interactions, part of the sensory array I ordinarily cherish. Heat, noise, lights, looks, words, gestures, personalities, appliances. A colloquial density that makes family life the one medium of sense knowledge in which an astonishment of heart is routinely contained.

Most of our longings go unfulfilled.

It is interesting to think of the great blaze of heaven that we winnow down to animal shapes and kitchen tools.

I am aware that when we see something, we are getting only a measure of information, a sense, an inkling of what is really there to see. I don't know the details or the terminology but I do know that the optic nerve is not telling the full truth. We're seeing only intimations. The rest is our invention, our way of constructing what is actual, if there is any such thing, philosophically, that we can call actual.

We will follow the bullet trajectories backwards to the lives that occupy the shadows, actual men who moan in their dreams.

è tipico dell'adolescente immaginare la fine del mondo come un accessorio del proprio contesto

She called me Tuck, which is what her mother used to call her father. All the male Browners were called Tuck. When the line began to pale, producing a series of aesthetes and incompetents, they gave the name to any man who married into the family, within reason.

What the hell does the Jewish Museum know about Guatemalan pricks? This particular prick isn't even circumcised.

He had a skinny neck and jug-handle ears to go with his starved skull - the innocent prewar look of a real murderer.

Popular Mechanics, Iowa

Today they are food stylists for NASA.

Chaque moment perdu est la vie.

The Stanford Linear Accelerator 3-Day Particle-Smashing Diet.