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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
4d13370	Freud is finished, Einstein's next.		don-delillo	Don DeLillo
631331e	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 inf..			Don DeLillo
9be5998	We] saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didn't say, What kind of casserole will that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make?		postmodernism	Don DeLillo
79a71ef	The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there,' she said. 'This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it.			Don DeLillo
7cfb9ad	Her death would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. Don't let us die, I want to cry out to that fifth-century sky ablaze with mystery and spiral light. Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver-spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you?			Don DeLillo
634b4a2	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, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.			Don DeLillo
23a8026	Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There's a m..			Don DeLillo
8769168	Because we're suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information.			Don DeLillo
26f72b0	I would spend the rest of my life turning to speak to her.			Don DeLillo
d4a3d4c	Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.			Don DeLillo
12e99c3	Off-camera lives are unverifiable.			Don DeLillo
ca0530c	These are among the people I've tried to know twice, the second time in memory and language. Through them, myself. They are what I've become, in ways I don't understand but which I believe will accrue to a rounded truth, a second life for me as well as them. Cracking jokes in the mandatory American manner of people self-concious about death. This is the humor of violent surprise. How do you connect things? Learn their names. It was a strang..			Don DeLillo
e277216	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..		suburbia	Don DeLillo
6674476	Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.			Don DeLillo
8021162	They've grown comfortable with their money,' I said. 'They genuinely believe they're entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.			Don DeLillo
fe6ce76	It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.			Don DeLillo
383b893	Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the m..			Don DeLillo
d26e203	The city is a device for measuring time.			Don DeLillo
d4716d4	Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.			Don DeLillo
406a1e2	That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.		good-and-evil humanity infectious-diseases summary ugliness world	Don DeLillo
078105d	The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw.			Don DeLillo
4a33874	Some people are lucky. They become who they are supposed to be. This did not happen to me until I met (your mother). One day we started to talk and it never stopped, this conversation.			Don DeLillo
554affe	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.'			Don DeLillo
0b485ba	I think it's a mistake to lose one's sense of death, even one's fear of death. Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.			Don DeLillo
fecb417	I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books.			Don DeLillo
0c925bf	In committing a work to memory we make it safe from decay. It stands untouched. Children memorize parts of stories their parents tell them. They want the same story again and again. Don't change a word or they get terribly upset. This is the unchanged narrative every culture needs in order to survive.			Don DeLillo
d904e34	It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.			Don DeLillo
3d558de	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 stru..		authority death	Don DeLillo
42fc785	There are no amateurs in the world of children.			Don DeLillo
a01ddc0	If you don't have the grace and wit to die early, you are forced to vanish, to hide as if in shame and apology.			Don DeLillo
167b251	Time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential. The future becomes insistent. "This is why something will happen soon, maybe today...to correct the acceleration of time. Bring nature back to normal, more or less."			Don DeLillo
6c2ca1a	She became confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn't working.			Don DeLillo
0862df4	The grasp of objects that bind us to some betokening.			Don DeLillo
0b5aeb3	We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now.			Don DeLillo
ba5f7b6	holes are interesting. there are books about holes.		don-delillo	Don DeLillo
a414ea2	Time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential. The future becomes insistent. "This is why something will happen soon, maybe today...to correct the acceleration of time. Bring nature back to normal, more or less." --			Don DeLillo
f04c05e	Now this girl was about twenty-one years old. A sweet little coed. Spends a night with a married man. Goes home the next day and tells her mama and daddy. Don't ask me why. Maybe just to rub their faces in it. They decide she needs a lesson. Whole family drives out into the desert, right out to that spot we just passed. All three of them plus the girl's pet dog. Papa tells the girl to dig a shallow grave. Mama gets down on her hands and kne..			Don DeLillo
877c477	It was agreeable to her, the smell of tobacco. It was part of her knowledge of his body. It was the aura of the man, a residue of smoke and unbroken habit, a dimension in the night, and she lapped it off the curled gray hairs on his chest and tasted it in his mouth. It was who he was in the dark, cigarettes and mumbled sleep and a hundred other things nameable and not.			Don DeLillo
27f701d	Remember literature, Charlie? It involved getting drunk and getting laid.			Don DeLillo
8d3985b	Those blanked-out eternities at the airport. Getting there, waiting there, standing shoeless in long lines. Think about it. We take off our shoes and remove our metal objects and then enter a stall and raise our arms and get body-scanned and sprayed with radiation and reduced to nakedness on a screen somewhere and then how totally helpless we are all over again as we wait on the tarmac, belted in, our plane eighteenth in line, and it's all ..			Don DeLillo
078cd8c	Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure.		delillo literature terror	Don DeLillo
a57a40c	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 lang..		tourists travel	Don DeLillo
f23eb90	She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear. Eric Packer about Vija Kinski		voice	Don DeLillo
33cdaaa	War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.			Don DeLillo

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