Don DeLillo - White Noise (1985)

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It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.

Don DeLillo
What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

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
The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.

Don DeLillo
In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.

Don DeLillo
Was she naked?" Lasher said. "To the waist," Cotsakis said. "From which direction?" Lasher said.

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
All plots tend to move deathwards. This is the nature of plots.

Don DeLillo
It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.

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

Don DeLillo
Because friends have to be brutally honest with each other. I'd feel terrible if I didn't tell you what I was thinking, especially at a time like this

Don DeLillo
Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.

Don DeLillo
Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.

Don DeLillo
Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.

Don DeLillo
The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

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
This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.

Don DeLillo
War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.

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
When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.

Don DeLillo
I want to immerse myself in American magic and dread.

Don DeLillo
The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.

Don DeLillo
I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.

Don DeLillo