Don DeLillo - Underworld (1997)

21 Sourced Quotes

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Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.

Don DeLillo
A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.

Don DeLillo
I think silence is the condition you accept as the judgment on your crimes.

Don DeLillo
You feel sorry for yourself. You think you're missing something and you don't know what it is. You're lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash.

Don DeLillo
Famous people don't want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there's something crawling in their clothes.

Don DeLillo
There are times when you want to stop working at faith and just be washed in a blowing wind that tells you everything.

Don DeLillo
Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire--not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.

Don DeLillo
You gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.

Don DeLillo
The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.

Don DeLillo
And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

Don DeLillo
The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress.

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

Don DeLillo
Sometimes I see something so moving I know I'm not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

Don DeLillo
Corporations are great and appalling things. They take you and shape you in nearly nothing flat, twist and swivel you. And they do it without overt persuasion, they do it with smiles and nods, a collective inflection of the voice.

Don DeLillo
I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.

Don DeLillo
Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts.

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

Don DeLillo
I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people's sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power.

Don DeLillo
I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.

Don DeLillo
That's the thing about baseball... You do what they did before you. That's the connection you make. There's a whole long line. A man takes his kid to a game and thirty years later this is what they talk about when the poor old mutt's wasting away in the hospital.

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