Top 350 Quotes & Sayings by Don DeLillo - Page 3

Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination.

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

Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

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

why something and not nothing? why music and not noise?

Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets.

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

Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.

When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.

You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

Words are not necessary to one's experience of the true life.

The more things I threw away, the more I found.

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

We surrounded ourselves with smoke and loud noise. That's the way we chose to live. I'm prepared to defend it.

All human existence is a trick of light.

days like this. i look at you and feel electric. tell me you don't feel it too."_Eric Packer

What did it mean, the first time, a thinking creature looked deeply into another's eyes? Did it take a hundred thousand years before this happened or it was the first thing they did, transcendingly, the thing that made them higher, made them modern, the gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in our souls?

It is interesting ... how weapons reflect the soul of the maker.

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.

A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million.

War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.

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

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night.

Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?

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.

Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into the night, if you stand a while and look.

People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.

Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.

I do think that in the near future, if it hasn't happened already, people will be able to use technology to design their own novels, perhaps with individuals themselves as the main character. In other words, everything is being individualized and narrowed.

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

I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.

World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.

Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets.' (20)

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. - Murray (WN 285)

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

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

To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.

There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist? (155)

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

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.

For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

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

There is a balance, a kind of standoff between the time continuum and the human entity, our frail bundle of soma and psyche. We eventually succumb to time, it's true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going. Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second.... We were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time.

Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.

First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there's a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger.

To plot is to live. […] We start out lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Picture a state funeral, Jack. It is all precision, detail, order, design. The nation holds its breath. - (WN 292)

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

Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.

Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours,man-hours, using labor more efficiently.

The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. (Point Omega)

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.

Sex finds us. Sex sees through us. That's why it's so shattering. It strips us of appearances.

There are no amateurs in the world of children.

Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.

The term itself--my life--is a desperate overstatement.

He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.

Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.

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.