Don DeLillo

“Picture yourself, Jack, a confirmed homebody, a sedentary fellow who finds himself walking in a deep wood. You spot something out of the corner of your eye. Before you know anything else, you know that this thing is very large and that it has no place in your ordinary frame of reference. A flaw in the world picture. Either it shouldn't be here or you shouldn't. Now the thing comes into full view. It is a grizzly bear, enormous, shiny brown, swaggering, dripping slime from its bared fangs. Jack, you have never seen a large animal in the wild. The sight of this grizzer is so electrifyingly strange that it gives you a renewed sense of yourself, a fresh awareness of the self— the self in terms of a unique and horrific situation. You see yourself in a new and intense way. You rediscover yourself. You are lit up for your own imminent dismemberment. The beast on hind legs has enabled you to see who you are as if for the first time, outside familiar surroundings, alone, distinct, whole. The name we give this complicated process is fear. [...]Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.(p. 218)”

“‎"As pessoas nao vão morrer. Não é esse o credo da nova cultura? As pessoas vão ser absorvidas em fluxos de informações. Não entendo nada disso. Os computadores vão morrer. Já estão morrendo na sua forma atual. Estão praticamente mortos como unidades distintas. Uma caixa, uma tela, um teclado. Eles estão se dissolvendo na textura da vida cotidiana. (...) Até a palavra computador parece retrógrada e burra.”

“People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.”

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

“Their bumper sticker read GUN CONTROL IS MIND CONTROL. In situations like this, you want to stick close to people in right-wing fringe groups.”

“Another one says she has asnap-off crotch. What do you think she means by that? I'm a little worried,though, about all these outbreaks of lifestyle diseases. I carry a reinforced ribbed condom at all times. One size fits all. But I have a feeling it's not much protection against the intelligence and adaptability of the modern virus.”

“It's like World War III. Everything is white. They'll take our bright colors away and use them in the war effort.”

“A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.”

“How many times do two people have to fuck before one of them deserves to die?”

“You understand it's not a matter of strategy. I'm not talking about secrets or deceptions. I'm talking about being yourself. If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”

“In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are.”

“That's why he was here, to surrender himself to longing, to listen to his host recite the anecdotal texts, all the passed-down stories of bonehead plays and swirling brawls, the pitching duels that carried into twilight, stories that Marvin had been collecting for half a century--the deep eros of memory that separates baseball from other sports.”

“This is the point of Babette.”

“The painted aircraft took on sunlight and pulse. Sweeps of color, bands and spatters, airy washes, the force of saturated light—the whole thing oddly personal, a sense of one painter’s hand moved by impulse and afterthought as much as by epic design. I hadn’t expected to register such pleasure and sensation. The air was color-scrubbed, coppers and ochers burning off the metal skin of the aircraft to exchange with the framing desert.”

“Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.”

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

“I'm not just a college professor. I'm the head of a department. I don't see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That's for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are.”

“A film can be undermined by the person you’re seeing it with, there in the dark, a ripple effect of attitude, scene by scene, shot by shot.”

“Was he at the movies to see a movie, she said, or maybe more narrowly, more essentially, simply to be at the movies?”

“I'm not saying we shouldn't grieve. Just, why don't we put it in God's hands? she said. Why haven't we learned this, after all the evidence of all the dead? We're supposed to believe in God but then why don't we obey the laws of God's universe, which teach us how small we are and where we're all going to end up?”

“Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.”

“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.”

“We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. "No one sees the barn," he said finally. A long silence followed. "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies." There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. "Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism." Another silence ensued. "They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.”

“Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.”

“I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.”

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

“El sexo nos descubre. El sexo nos revela como somos. Por eso es tan estremecedor. Nos despoja de toda apariencia.”

“Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.”

“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?”

“The game doesn't change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life.”

“People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It's simply how we live.”

“Look past the violence. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.”

“Il libro si adatta alla mano, si adatta all'individuo. Il modo in cui tieni in mano un libro e giri le pagine, mani e occhi, i movimenti meccanici per rastrellare la ghiaia su una calda strada di campagna, i segni sulla pagina, e come una pagina è uguale alla successiva eppure completamente diversa, le vite nei libri, le colline che diventano verdi, vecchie colline ondulate che ti facevano sentire che stavi diventando un altro.”

“If you don't have the grace and wit to die early, you are forced to vanish, to hide as if in shame and apology.”

“La preghiera è una strategia pratica, la conquista di un vantaggio temporale nei mercati capitali del Peccato e della Remissione.”

“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.”

“There are no amateurs in the world of children.”

“Silvery dancing strands that seemed the pure play of light, light as evanescent news, ideas borne on light.”

“The alphabet is male and female. If you will know the correct order of letters, you make a world, you make creation. This is why they will hide the order. If you will know the combinations, you make all life and death.”

“Talent is more erotic when it's wasted.”

“It's all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.”

“He was thinking about automated teller machines. The term was aged and burdened by its own historical memory. It worked at cross-purposes, unable to escape the inferences of fuddled human personnel and jerky moving parts. The term was part of the process that the device was meant to replace. It was anti-futuristic, so cumbrous and mechanical that even the acronym seemed dated.”

“There was religion, then there was God. Lianne wanted to disbelieve. Disbelief was the line of travel that led to clarity of thought and purpose. Or was this simply another form of superstition? She wanted to trust in the forces and processes of the natural world, this only, perceptible reality and scientific endeavor, men and women alone on earth. She knew there was no conflict between science and God. Take one with the other. But she didn't want to. There were the scholars and philosophers she'd studied in school, books she'd read at thrilling dispatches, personal, making her shake at times, and there was the sacred art she'd always loved. Doubters created this work, and ardent believers, and those who'd doubted and then believed, and she was free to think about doubt and believe simultaneously. But she didn't want to. God would crowd her, make her weaker. God would be a presence that remained unimaginable. She wanted this only, to snuff out the pulse of the shaky faith she'd held for much of her life.”

“He liked to talk about the anatomy of racecars, motorcycles, hunting rifles, how things work, and she liked to listen. It was a mark of the distance between them that she listened so eagerly, the perennial miles, the weeks and months”

“But you have to direct yourself out of this thing, not into it. Don't fold up.”

“Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.”

“Nei miei sogni scorrevano fiumi e peccati, occhi sbarrati di volti sommersi. Mi risvegliai nel silenzio e nel gelo, sotto l'occhio accusatore dei riflettori ad arco. La città traboccava di persone in cerca dell'uomo o della donna in grado di salvarle. Puzzavo di sudore freddo, alcol e paura. Il loft mi sembrava sconfinato, un'immagine ripescata dal fondo sabbioso di un sogno.”

“Poco tempo fa sono andato a pranzo con un amico. Si è messo a piangere. Voleva costruirsi una barca e salpare per la Tasmania. Io gli ho riso in faccia. Una settimana dopo gli è venuta un'emorragia cerebrale. Non siamo capaci di imparare niente dagli stereotipi che ci circondano, neppure che siamo tutti uguali.”

“Once, probably, I used to think that vagueness was a loftier kind of poetry, truer to the depths of consciousness, and maybe when I started to read mathematics and science back in the mid-70s I found an unexpected lyricism in the necessarily precise language that scientists tend to use My instinct, my superstition is that the closer I see a thing and the more accurately I describe it, the better my chances of arriving at a certain sensuality of expression.”

“Quel po' di senso di colpa che provavo dipendeva dall'immagine di Jennifer sola e umiliata, non dal banale tradimento di Meredith. Per Jennifer io rimanevo un enigma. Rifiutavo di concederle la minima percezione di me, e la ragione posso solo immaginarla: avevo un bisogno disperato di ogni minima briciola del mio ego per vincere la paura di svanire io stesso.”