Don DeLillo - Death Quotes

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Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

Don DeLillo
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.

Don DeLillo
Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?' What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing

Don DeLillo
Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.

Don DeLillo
I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.

Don DeLillo
If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

Don DeLillo
Her death would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. Don't let us die, I want to cry out to that fifth-century sky ablaze with mystery and spiral light. Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver-spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you?

Don DeLillo
Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.

Don DeLillo
A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot...

Don DeLillo
The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you've killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it's ordinary murder.

Don DeLillo
People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.

Don DeLillo
Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.

Don DeLillo
We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

Don DeLillo
Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.

Don DeLillo