|
8824f77
|
What's the point of living if we don't die at the end of it?
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
7597343
|
The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.
|
|
family
information
fact
knowledge
|
Don DeLillo |
|
3fb08a4
|
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.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
e8543c6
|
Maybe what has to happen is that the individual must allow himself to be swept along, must find himself in the stream of no-choice, the single direction. This is what makes things inevitable. You use the restrictions and penalties they invent to make yourself stronger. History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin. (101)
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
91720e6
|
What is a nebulous mass, just out of idle curiosity?" "A possible growth in the body." "And it's called nebulous because you can't get a clear picture of it." "We get very clear pictures. The imaging block takes the clearest pictures humanly possible. It's called a nebulous mass because it has no definite shape, form, or limits." "What can it do in terms of worst-case scenario contingencies?" "Cause a person to die." "Speak English, for Go..
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
24ca716
|
Something about the time of year depressed him deeply. Overcast skies and cutting wind, leaves falling, dusk falling, dark too soon, night flying down before you are ready. It's a terror. It's a bareness of the soul. He hears the rustle of nuns. Here comes winter in the bone. We've set it loose on the land. There must be some song or poem, some folk magic we can use to ease this fear. Skelly Bone Pete. Here it is in the landscape and sky. W..
|
|
skelly-bone-pete
libra
don-delillo
|
Don DeLillo |
|
66d15bc
|
You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal existence on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.
|
|
murray
|
Don DeLillo |
|
33ae905
|
He'd come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
4481e6f
|
These were the things that built the world. Not to know or care about them was a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender, of species. What could be more useless than a man who couldn't fix a dripping faucet--fundamentally useless, dead to history, to the messages in his genes? I wasn't sure I disagreed.
|
|
manliness
tools
masculinity
|
Don DeLillo |
|
bfa5c4b
|
People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
839aab8
|
It's all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. 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 all the surfaces, when yo..
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
dce3f7c
|
Women have faith in the mechanics of adjustment. A woman knows how to want something. She'll take chances to secure the future.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
55fc70a
|
Every act he performed was self-haunted and synthetic.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
1e22aae
|
The vast and terrible depth." "Of course," he said. "The inexhaustibility." "I understand." "The whole huge nameless thing." "Yes, absolutely." "The massive darkness." "Certainly, certainly." "The whole terrible endless hugeness." "I know exactly what you mean."
|
|
mortality
fear-of-death
the-unknown
|
Don DeLillo |
|
ab78559
|
You live in a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
bd71693
|
slightly older men and women, they had professions and soft slacks with knife pleats and a certain ease of bearing and belonging, the package of attitudes and values known as lifestyle
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
299b925
|
He walked among the bookstore shelves, hearing Muzak in the air. There were rows of handsome covers, prosperous and assured. He felt a fine excitement, hefting a new book, fitting hand over sleek spine, seeing lines of type jitter past his thumb as he let the pages fall. He was a young man, shrewd in his fervors, who knew there were books he wanted to read and others he absolutely had to own, the ones that gesture in special ways, that have..
|
|
bookstores
|
Don DeLillo |
|
242f4b9
|
Is it very different at home, or on the street, or waiting at the gate to board a flight? I maintain myself on the puppet drug of personal technology. Every touch of a button brings the neural rush of finding something I never knew and never needed to know until it appears at my anxious fingertips, where it remains for a shaky second before disappearing forever.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
0cd5f85
|
days like this. i look at you and feel electric. tell me you don't feel it too."_Eric Packer"
|
|
don-delillo
|
Don DeLillo |
|
946891f
|
I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
d2e8459
|
As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to who was capable of understanding the complexity (simplicity) of the problem or the approaches to a tentative solution. There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or "terror in a lonely place," the original semantic content of the ..
|
|
loneliness
mind
depression
despair
obsession
art-creation
concentration
thought
mental-health
|
Don DeLillo |
|
1571bd0
|
Their bumper sticker read GUN CONTROL IS MIND CONTROL. In situations like this, you want to stick close to people in right-wing fringe groups.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
aa37f09
|
Say heat. Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously, I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered.
|
|
sex
|
Don DeLillo |
|
297652a
|
I believe, Jack, there are two kinds of people in the world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don't have the dispoisiton, the rage or whatever it takes to be a killer. We le death happen. We lie down and die. But think what it's like to be a killer. Think how exciting it is, in theory, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit. The more people you kill, the more credit yo..
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
1b27ded
|
Vanity is a defensive quality. it contains an element of fear.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
2370a8c
|
Property is no longer about power, personality and command. It's not about vulgar display or tasteful display. Because it no longer has weight or shape. The only thing that matters is the price you pay. Yourself, Eric, think. What did you buy for your one hundred and four million dollars? Not dozens of rooms, incomparable views, private elevators. Not the rotating bedroom and computerized bed. Not the swimming pool or the shark. Was it air ..
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
118e86e
|
It was necessary because she needed to do it. This is what made it necessary.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
11eea94
|
You understand it's not a matter of strategy. I'm not talking about secrets or deceptions. I'm talking about being yourself. If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
aa53c44
|
God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the .45 to even things up.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
83fbbb1
|
No body knows how to feel and they're checking around for hints.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
921f569
|
Civilization did not rise and flourish as men hammered out hunting scenes on bronze gates and whispered philosophy under the stars, with garbage as a noisome offshoot, swept away and forgotten. No, garbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste, to use what we couldn't discard, to reprocess what we couldn't use. Garbage pushed back.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
8a0d82d
|
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?
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
2ef5366
|
As though in her heart she was not a travel writer at all, as her mother had said she wished to be, but simply a traveler, in the purer form, someone who collects impressions, dense anatomies of feeling, but does not care to record them.
|
|
wanderlust
|
Don DeLillo |
|
00dde38
|
That's what it all comes down to in the end,' he said. 'A person spends his life saying good-bye to other people. How does he say good-bye to himself?
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
424811d
|
it occurred to me that perhaps in this city the crowd was essential to the individual; without it, he had nothing against which to scrape his anger, no echo for grief, and not the slightest proof that there were others more lonely than he. it was just a passing thought.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
aba11f5
|
You and I. We're here. So might as well.
|
|
don-delillo
|
Don DeLillo |
|
1a3cbc0
|
The thousands stand and chant. Around them in the world, people ride escalators going up and sneak secret glances at the faces coming down. People dangle teabags over hot water in white cups. Cars run silently on the autobahns, streaks of painted light. People sit at desks and stare at office walls. They smell their shirts and drop them in the hamper. People bind themselves into numbered seats and fly across time zones and high cirrus and d..
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
42cff0b
|
The art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
eabc995
|
the half-concealed disasters that constitute a life.
|
|
life
disasters
|
Don DeLillo |
|
d0f016c
|
Technology is crucial to civilization why? Because it helps us make our fate. We don't need God or miracles or the flight of the bumble bee. But it is also crouched and undecidable. It can go either way.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
f2dd9a4
|
He imagines they are uniformly smiling, showing the face they squeeze out with the toothpaste every morning.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
4005495
|
What makes this city different is that nobody expects to be in one place for ten minutes. Everybody moves all the time. Seven nameless men own everything and move us around on a board. People are swept out into the streets because the owners need the space. Then they are swept off the streets because someone owns the air they breathe. Men buy and sell air in the sky and there are bodies heaped together in boxes on the sidewalk. Then they sw..
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
758ff2e
|
I believed we could know what was happening to us. We were not excluded from our own lives. That is not my head on someone else's body in the photograph that's introduced as evidence. I didn't believe that nations play-act on a grand scale. I lived in the real.
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |
|
18a6ac6
|
Crowds, Scott said. People trudging along wide streets, pushing carts or riding bikes, crowd after crowd in the long lens of the camera so they seem even closer together than they really are, totally jampacked, and I think of how they merge with the future, how the future makes room for the non-achiever, the trudger, the nonagressor, the nonindividual. Totally calm in the long lens, crowd on top of crowd, pedaling, trudging, faceless, sort ..
|
|
|
Don DeLillo |