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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
9f7dc0b	Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.			Don DeLillo
01209df	In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardw..			Don DeLillo
3364428	When I get real high I can feel the space between sounds.			Don DeLillo
f8b0b94	I see my son in the small tumult of the moment. He knows he has to handle this alone and does it conscientiously enough, shaking the man's hand, nodding madly. He is not experienced at hearty rapport, of course, but his effort is meticulous and touching. He knows the man's pleasure is important. He has seen this everywhere on the island and he has listened to his mother. We must be more precise in the details of our responses. This is how w..			Don DeLillo
7f9537e	At first it was only a nuisance. Now it's a nuisance that threatens to become a way of life.			Don DeLillo
7aa684f	It is the neon epic of Saturday night.			Don DeLillo
673bc82	Once you start a file, Delphine, it's just a matter of time before the material comes pouring in. Notes, lists, photos, rumors. Every bit and piece and whisper in the world that doesn't have a life until someone comes along to collect it. It's all been waiting just for you.			Don DeLillo
caaeabc	Sometimes it was hard to say things. Things were so complicated. People might resent what you said. They might use your remarks against you. They might take you seriously and act upon your words, actually do something. They might not even hear you, which perhaps was the only thing worth hoping for. But it was more complicated than that. The sheer effort of speaking. Easier to stay apart, leave things as they are, avoid responsibility for re..			Don DeLillo
67011d8	Shoes are like people. They adjust to situations.			Don DeLillo
d7aef15	I had to wonder whether this interval had any more spread and breadth than just another sequestered moment, bordered by closed doors. We			Don DeLillo
6327b2b	I understood that he did not see the person he was talking to. He had the drifter's inclination to be impervious to names and faces. These were interchangeable components room to room, country to country. He did not talk so much as narrate. He traced a wavy line, his, and there was usually someone willing to be the random body that he told his stories to.			Don DeLillo
80e17cd	I'll tell you what it means, these orbiting sensors that can hear us in our beds. It means the end of loyalty. The more complex the systems, the less conviction in people. Conviction will be drained out of us. Devices will drain us, make us vague and pliant.			Don DeLillo
b545872	Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely.			Don DeLillo
45964b3	It was the best kind of class to have in the afternoon, an exercise in almost pure language, demanding nothing more than fractional consciousness since there wasn't the slightest hope of understanding what those poems were all about, and we drowsed and smiled, happy in our own little angel-infancy, snug in our Thamesian punt, and when the sonic belch of experimental jets went ripping across the desert we came close to applauding the symboli..			Don DeLillo
2380a86	Choice is a subtle form of disease.			Don DeLillo
2bd739c	We learn nothing from the stereotypes around us, not even that we're all the same.			Don DeLillo
6a5a493	It takes centuries to invent the primitive.			Don DeLillo
af1b5bd	When times are bad, people feel compelled to overeat.		eat eating eating-disorder overeating	Don DeLillo
5c9266c	She is the kind of of child who feels a protective tenderness towards her own beginnings. It is part of her strategy in a world of displacements to make every effort to restore and preserve, keep things together for their value as remembering objects, a way of fastening herself to a life.			Don DeLillo
2e3fbaa	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.			Don DeLillo
00b7c30	In the afternoon I drank Coke and wrote poetry.			Don DeLillo
4cc1b21	The only problem I had was that my whole life was a lesson in the effect of echoes, that I was living in the third person.			Don DeLillo
8e4c221	Don't worry about me," he said. "The little limp means nothing. People my age limp. A limp is a natural thing at a certain age. Forget the cough. It's healthy to cough. You move the stuff around. The stuff can't harm you as long as it doesn't settle in one spot and stay there for years. So the cough's all right. So is the insomnia. The insomnia's all right. What do I gain by sleeping? You reach an age when every minute of sleep is one less ..			Don DeLillo
ca3f81e	Where do you live?" "In the hearts of men," Sullivan said."			Don DeLillo
e9983c2	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.			Don DeLillo
2c6696f	There is a thing about the trust of a dog that makes up for a lot of heartache we take in this life.		pets	Don DeLillo
caeb8ed	This was the first of the St. Augustines. Previous memos had borne messages from Zwingli, Levi-Strauss, Rilke, Chekhov, Tillich, William Blake, Charles Olson and a Kiowa chief named Satanta. Naturally the person responsible for these messages became known throughout the company as the Mad Memo-Writer. I never referred to him that way because it was much too obvious a name. I called him Trotsky. There was no special reason for choosing Trots..			Don DeLillo
90dfd1c	The novel is whatever novelists are doing at a given time. If we're not doing the big social novel fifteen years from now, it'll probably mean our sensibilities have changed in ways that make such work less compelling to us -- we won't stop because the market dried up. The writer leads, he doesn't follow. The dynamic lives in the writer's mind, not in the size of the audience. And if the social novel lives, but only barely, surviving in the..		letters-of-note novel novel-writing	Don DeLillo
b1bcd0d	I like old movies on television where a man lights a woman's cigarette. That's all they seemed to do in those old movies, the men and women. I'm normally so totally disregardless. But every time I see an old movie on television, I keep a sharp eye out for a man lighting a woman's cigarette.			Don DeLillo
07e576a	The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. They walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go, clusters of well-dressed figures frozen in the aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic, trying to remember where they'd seen the Cream of Wheat.			Don DeLillo
2fa9557	Solitude asks no pledges of anyone.			Don DeLillo
9a23ee8	It was May of my senior year at Leighton Gage and on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons we sat in an air-conditioned hourglass and savored our own total incomprehension as an assistant professor charted the poems of Dryden, Lovelace, Fanshawe and Suckling. They were all so incomparably dead, the Penguin poets, and we loved them because their lines meant less to us than the dark side of the moon.			Don DeLillo
8d6b38c	Rain turned to sleet, sleet to snow.			Don DeLillo
2ec38ae	a life terrain, might itself be the object of a person's study and wonder for years. A cosmology against the void.			Don DeLillo
1aac290	If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of me..		crime lies perception truth	Don DeLillo
e15def0	Talent is everything; sanity is nothing.			Don DeLillo
2309a9d	The ruins stood above the hissing traffic like some monument to doomed expectations.			Don DeLillo
4052e17	The long soft life is what I feel I'm settling into and the only question is how deadly it will turn out to be. But			Don DeLillo
bd7b866	Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands.			Don DeLillo
b52ca9e	Whatever you set your mind to, your personal total obsession, this is what kills you. Poetry kills you if you're a poet, and so on. People choose their death whether they know it or not.			Don DeLillo
dc263aa	I needed death in order to believe I was living, an atmosphere of death much more real and personal than anything the newspapers can offer.			Don DeLillo
ce3b7ba	Fear is intense self-awareness.			Don DeLillo
31f0d56	When you see a thing like that, a thing that becomes a newsreel, you begin to feel you are a carrier of some solemn scrap of history.			Don DeLillo
df5e273	I know it's thankless to be sensible in the face of someone's primitive distrust.			Don DeLillo

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