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c3e8934
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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 scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartl..
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Don DeLillo |
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fd4aa5e
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Shit is universal no matter which language.
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Don DeLillo |
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34203d9
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why something and not nothing? why music and not noise?
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don-delillo
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Don DeLillo |
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f03f4a2
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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.
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Don DeLillo |
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2c6c69d
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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. There must always be believers. Fools, idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues. We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. You are sure that you are right but you don't want everyone to think as you do. Ther..
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Don DeLillo |
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1f82916
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Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.
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Don DeLillo |
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8586f23
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In the subways, in many of the streets, in corners of the park at night, contact could be dangerous. Contact was not a word or a touch but the air that flashed between strangers.
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Don DeLillo |
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ae20227
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If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.
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Don DeLillo |
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405fcf0
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It's like we've been flung back in time," he said. "Here we are in the Stone Age, knowing all these great things after centuries of progress but what can we do to make life easier for the Stone Agers? Can we make a refrigerator? Can we even explain how it works? What is electricity? What is light? We experience these things every day of our lives but what good does it do if we find ourselves hurled back in time and we can't even tell people..
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Don DeLillo |
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74aa30f
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The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.
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words
writing
life
speech
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Don DeLillo |
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cffd712
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The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.
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Don DeLillo |
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0a2d205
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The term itself--my life--is a desperate overstatement.
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Don DeLillo |
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998d007
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He said, "The word for moonlight is moonlight."
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Don DeLillo |
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8e04aa4
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I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.
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Don DeLillo |
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aa24371
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May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan.
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Don DeLillo |
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bd47527
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The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.
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life
ennui
postmodern
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Don DeLillo |
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b2910a4
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Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed ..
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britain-handjobs-america
cbgb
no-wave
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Don DeLillo |
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11dc4d6
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At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her.
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Don DeLillo |
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93ad817
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History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood -- read the speeches of Mussolini -- at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation. (82)
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Don DeLillo |
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65c27e3
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Supermarkets this large and clean and modern are a revelation to me. I spent my life in small steamy delicatessens with slanted display cabinets full of trays that hold soft wet lumpy matter in pale colours. High enough cabinets so you had to stand on tiptoes to give your order. Shouts, accents. In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere. Men shout as they die to be noticed, remembere..
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death
dying
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Don DeLillo |
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0ada236
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The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamily self-aware, the submicroscopic moments. He said this more than once, Elster did, in more than one way. His life happened, he said, when he sat staring at a blank wall, thinking about dinner. An eight-hundred page biography is nothing more than dead conjecture, he said. I almo..
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Don DeLillo |
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5384334
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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.
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Don DeLillo |
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25897a5
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A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.
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photography
history
metaphysics
technology
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Don DeLillo |
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431cdbd
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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.
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Don DeLillo |
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22d6583
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Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving.
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Don DeLillo |
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1dc58c0
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You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.
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Don DeLillo |
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a07c848
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Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets.' (20)
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Don DeLillo |
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66befac
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Coming and going I am leaving. I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left. Because I am here and where. And I will go or not or never. And I have seen what I will see. If I am where I will be. Because nothing comes between me.
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Don DeLillo |
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74cdc17
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Sometimes I see something so moving I know I'm not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.
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Don DeLillo |
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6ddfee7
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The only private language I know is self-exaggeration. I think I've grown a second self in this room. It's the self-important fool that keeps the writer going. I exaggerate the pain of writing, the pain of solitude, the failure, the rage, the confusion, the helplessness, the fear, the humiliation. The narrower the boundaries of my life, the more I exaggerate myself. If the pain is real, why do I inflate it? Maybe this is the only pleasure I..
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Don DeLillo |
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c0de53d
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Because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond necessity.
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Don DeLillo |
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7d3f3c8
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Was she naked?" Lasher said. "To the waist," Cotsakis said. "From which direction?" Lasher said."
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Don DeLillo |
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dc529c6
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Look past the violence. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.
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Don DeLillo |
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e664f14
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World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.
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don-delillo
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Don DeLillo |
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e82cec4
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Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another's care and protection.
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Don DeLillo |
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1c2daad
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To plot is to live. [...] We start out lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Pic..
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Don DeLillo |
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a7fa905
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Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.
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Don DeLillo |
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af87920
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To be a tourist is to escape accountability.
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Don DeLillo |
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e247aaa
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Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.
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Don DeLillo |
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14e2c7c
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The truth of the world is exhausting.
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Don DeLillo |
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0761ed6
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There's the life and there's the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event. Who will write the book and who will play the lovers in the movie? Everything seeks its own heightened version.
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Don DeLillo |
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4d442cc
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There is a world inside the world.
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Don DeLillo |
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2635437
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A fact is innocent until someone wants it; then it become intelligence.
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Don DeLillo |
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89f7963
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You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness.
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Don DeLillo |