Don DeLillo - White Noise (1985)

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California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

Don DeLillo
Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past.

Don DeLillo
In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled.

Don DeLillo
It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.

Don DeLillo
The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire.

Don DeLillo
He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.

Don DeLillo
Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.

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

Don DeLillo
Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.

Don DeLillo
Every disaster made us wish for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.

Don DeLillo
It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

Don DeLillo
Your brain has a trillion neurons and every neuron has ten thousand little dendrites. The system of inter-communication is awe-inspiring.

Don DeLillo
Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.

Don DeLillo
In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are.

Don DeLillo
What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.

Don DeLillo
Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.

Don DeLillo
Clouds are no deterrent. Clouds intensify the drama, trap and shape the light.

Don DeLillo
The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.

Don DeLillo
The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.

Don DeLillo
The best moments involve a loss of control. It's a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often - completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages - I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.

Don DeLillo
I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfilment in America...

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
In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere.

Don DeLillo
There's something nearly mystical about certain words and phrases that float through our lives. It's computer mysticism. Words that are computer generated to be used on products that might be sold anywhere from Japan to Denmark - words devised to be pronounceable in a hundred languages. And when you detach one of these words from the product it was designed to serve, the words acquires a chantlike quality.

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

Don DeLillo
There was an honesty inherent in bulkiness if it is just the right amount.

Don DeLillo
Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is 'I know this feeling. I was here before'.

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
For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.

Don DeLillo
He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.

Don DeLillo