Don DeLillo - History Quotes

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The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now.

Don DeLillo
History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood — read the speeches of Mussolini — at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation.

Don DeLillo
Longing on a large scale is what makes history.

Don DeLillo
He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history—the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.

Don DeLillo
Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.

Don DeLillo
I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

Don DeLillo
Terror makes the new future possible. All men one man, Men live in history as never before. He is saying we make an 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.

Don DeLillo
Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.

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