Quotes by Don DeLillo

I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds.

And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbors yard, some kind of kickball maybe, and they speak in your voice, or piggyback races on the weedy lawn, and its your voice you hear, essentially, under the glimmerglass sky, and you look at the things in the room, offscreen, unwebbed, the tissued grain of the deskwood alive in light, the thick lived tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measures of experience in a random glance, the monks candle reflected in the slope of the phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl of the braided wick, and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow pencils, skewed all crazy, and the plied lives of the simplest surface, the slabbed butter melting on the crumbled bun, and the yellow of the yellow of the pencils, and you try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world, taking all its meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments out into the streets somehow, its whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence, the tone of hail and farewell, a word that carries the sunlit ardor of an object deep in drenching noon, the argument of binding touch, but its only a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive--a word that spreads a longing through the raw sprawl of the city and out across the dreaming bournes and orchards to the solitary hills.Peace.

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?

Only absences were fully shared.

Why shouldnt his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach?Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you.

I like simple men and complicated women.

Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although I wouldnt say that to a dying man.

Memory is the faculty of absolution. Men developed memories to ease their disquiet over things they did as men. The deep past is the only innocence and therefore necessary to retain.

What you see is not what wee se. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

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 my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it’s being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn’t have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing—maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world.

This happened back east of course. Ive heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. Its a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and experience, its time disguised, its light-up time, shifting smoky time tricked out as some locus of stable arrangement. When people use that term theyre talking about the way things used to be before they moved out here, the way the world used to be, not just New Jersey or South Philly, or before their parents moved, or grandparents, and about the way things still exist in some private relativity theory, some smoky shifting mind dimension, or before the other men and women came this way, the ones in Conestoga wagons, a term we learned in grade school, a back-east term, stemming from the place where the wagons were made. (pg.333)

Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.

Everybody wants to own the end of the world.

He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.

The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.

I am the false character that follows the name around.

All that incoherence. Selection, election, option, alternative. All behind him now. Codes and formats. Courses of action. Values, bias, predilection. Choice is a subtle form of disease.

We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identicalstructures.

God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the .45 to even things up.