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.”

“Everybody knows the thing about an infinite number of monkeys," Fenig said. "An infinite number of monkeys is put to work at an infinite number of typewriters and eventually one of them reproduces a great work of literature. In what language I don't know. But what about an infinite number of writers in an infinite number of cages? Would they make on monkey sound? One genuine chimp noise? Would they eventually swing by their toes from an infinite number of monkey bars? Would they shit monkey shit? It's academic, you say. You may be right.”

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

“He'd come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain.”

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

“People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.”

“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.”

“Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.”

“The time of dangling insects arrived. White houses with caterpillars dangling from the eaves. White stones in driveways. You can walk at night down the middle of the street and hear women talking on the telephone. Warmer weather produces voices in the dark. They are talking about their adolescent sons. How big, how fast. The sons are almost frightening. The quantities they eat. The way they loom in doorways. These are the days that are full of wormy bugs. They are in the grass, stuck to the siding, hanging in the hair, hanging from the trees and eaves, stuck to the window screens. The women talk long-distance to grandparents of growing boys. They share the Trimline phone, beamish old folks in hand-knit sweaters on fixed incomes. What happens to them when the commercial ends?”

“I sat on the front steps alone, waiting for a sense of ease and peace to settle in the air around me.A woman passing on the street said, ´A decongestant, an antihistamine, a cough suppressant, a pain reliever.´”

“Murray said, 'I don't trust anybody's nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.”

“His stillness was commanding. I felt myself getting whiter by the second. What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in? I was scared to the marrow. I was cold and hot, dry and wet, myself and someone else. The fist clenched in my chest. I went to the staircase and sat on the top step, looking into my hands. So much remained. Every word and thing a beadwork of bright creation.”

“She was shining a light on us, she was coming into being, endlessly being formed and reformed as the muscles in her face worked at smiling and speaking, as the electronic dots swarmed.”

“I stood there, listening. The wind blew snow from the branches. Snow blew out of the woods in eddies and sweeping gusts. I raised my collar, put my gloves back on. When the air was still again, I walked among the stones, trying to read the names and dates, adjusting the flags to make them swing free. Then I stood and listened. 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. May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan.”

“this was the man who would not submit to her need for probing intimacy, overintimacy, the urge to ask, examine, delve, draw things out, trade secrets, tell everything. it was a need that had the body in it, hands, feet, genitals, scummy odors, clotted dirt, even if it was all talk or sleepy murmur. she wanted to absorb everything, childlike, the dust of stray sensation, whatever she could breathe in from other people's pores. she used to think she was other people. other people have truer lives.”

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

“The plane had lost power in all three engines, dropped from thirty-four thousand feet to twelve thousand feet. Something like four miles. When the steep glide began, people rose, fell, collided, swam in their seats. Then the serious screaming and moaning began. Almost immediately a voice from the flight deck was heard on the intercom: "We're falling out of the sky! We're going down! We're a silver gleaming death machine!" This outburst struck the passengers as an all but total breakdown of authority, competence and command presence and it brought on a round of fresh and desperate wailing.”

“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.”

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

“Ample women do not plan such things. They lack the guile for conspiracies of the body.”

“He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows.”

“I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own disasters.”

“holes are interesting. there are books about holes.”

“it's not the sex you think I've had. it's the sex i want. that's what you smell on me. because the more I look at you, the more A know about us both. And the more A want to have sex with you. because there's a certain kind of sex that has an element of cleansing. it's the antidote to disillusion. the counterpoison.”

“I want to eat lunch. You want to eat lunch. We're people in the world. We need to eat and talk.”

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

“she knows what he means, that they don’t have to touch. the same thing that’s happening to him is happening to her. she doesn’t need to crawl under the table ans suck his dick. too tire to interest either one of them. the flow is strong between them. the emotional tone. let it express itself. he sees her in her wallow and feel his pelvic muscles begin to quiver. he say, tell me to stop and i’ll stop. but he doesn’t wait for her to reply. there isn’t time. the tails of his sperm cells are lashing already. she is his sweetheart and lover and slut undying. he doesn’t have to do the unspeakable thing he wants to do. he only has to speak it. because they’re beyond every model of established behavior. he only wants to say the words.” _Eric Packer”

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

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

“I look at you. I know what you are. You are sloppy-bodied, smelly and wet. A woman who was born to sit trapped in a chair while a man tells her how much she excites him.”

“Days like this. I look at you and feel electric. Tell me you don't feel it too.”

“it can't afford to be hard. it won't allow itself psychologically.”

“this is the woman you are inside the life. looking at you, what? i'm more excited than i've been since the first burning nights of adolescent frenzy. excited and confused. i look at you and feel an erection stirring even as the situation argues strenuously against it." _Eric Packer”

“It's there in your face, all of it, the way it rarely shows in any face. What do I see? Something lazy, sexy and insatiable.”

“I like your mother. You have your mother's breasts.""Her breasts.""Great stand-up tits." he said”

“You and I. We're here. So might as well.”

“When he died he would not end. The world would end.”

“Freud is finished, Einstein's next.”

“Talent is everything. If you've got talent, nothing else matters. You can screw up your personal life something terrible. So what. If you've got talent, it's there in reserve. Anybody who has talent they know they have it and that's it. It's what makes you what you are. It tells you you're you. Talent is everything; sanity is nothing. I'm convinced of it. I think I had something once. I showed promise, didn't I? But I was too sane. I couldn't make the leap out of my own soul into the soul of the universe. That's the leap they all made. From Blake to Rimbaud. I don't write anything but checks. I read science fiction. I go on business trips to South Bend and Rochester. The one in Minnesota. Not Rochester, New York. Rochester, Minnesota. I couldn't make the leap.”

“The whole country's going to puke blood when they read it.”

“The encounter put me in the mood to shop...Babette and the kids followed me into the elevator, into the shops set along the tiers, through the emporiums and the department stores, puzzled but excited by my desire to buy. When I could not decide between two shirts, they encouraged me to buy both. When I said I was hungry they fed me pretzels, beer, souvlaki. The two girls scouted ahead, spotting things they thought I might want or need, running back to get me, to clutch my arms, to plead with me to follow. The...y were my guides to endless well-being...My family gloried in the event. I was one of them, shopping, at last. They gave me advice, badgered clerks on my behalf...We moved from store to store, rejecting not only items in certain departments, not only entire departments but whole stores, mammoth corporations that did not strike our fancy for one reason or another. There was always another store, three floors, eight floors...I shopped with reckless abandon. I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it...I began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I'd forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me. I traded money for goods. The more money I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums. These sums poured off my skin like so much rain”

“It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams. ― Don DeLillo, Americana (ACTES SUD; 0 edition, August 10, 1993)”

“I am advising you in this matter not only as your chief of finance, but as a woman who would still be married to her husbands if they had looked at her the way you have looked at me here today.”

“If this makes me sexier then where are you going?”

“We're a silver gleaming death machine!”

“The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.”

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

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

“We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now.”

“It's how the news becomes so powerful it doesn't need TV or newspapers. It exists in people's perceptions. It's something they invent, strong enough to seem real. It's the news without the media.”