Don DeLillo

“You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out" - Murray (WN 285).”

“Every time she saw a videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept on watching. The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone's, into some distance, out beyond the towers.”

“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.”

“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”

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

“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.”

“No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.”

“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.”

“American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.”

“This makes me feel ritually unclean.”

“Opportunity, adventure, sunsets, dusty death.”

“He said, "The word for moonlight is moonlight.”

“Explain me to myself, you’ll make me choke on my lunch. Feel sympathy for me, I’ll puke monkey blood on your understated shoes.”

“I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.”

“Off-camera lives are unverifiable.”

“We commit our crimes at night and reveal ourselves in the high noon of studio lights.”

“The term itself—my life—is a desperate overstatement.”

“Do you think I'm somehow healthier because I don't know how to repress? Is it possible that constant fear is the natural state of man and that by living close to my fear I am actually doing something heroic, Murray?"Do you feel heroic?"No."Then you probably aren't.”

“These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.”

“California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.”

“The nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe." "As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe... Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.”

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