Don DeLillo Quotes - Page 5

Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun.

In the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape.

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.

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.

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

In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.

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

People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.

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

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

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)

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)

Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.

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

All human existence is a trick of light.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?

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