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2a61332
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It's almost unbelievable when you think of it, how they live there in all that ice and sand and mountainous wilderness. Look at it,' he says. 'Huge barren deserts, huge oceans. How do they endure all those terrible things? The floods alone. The earthquakes alone make it crazy to live there. Look at those fault systems. They're so big, there's so many of them. The volcanic eruptions alone. What could be more frightening than a volcanic erupt..
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Don DeLillo |
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6566d4b
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Because we're suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information." [...] "The flow is constant," Alfonse said. "Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fir..
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Don DeLillo |
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8f9f7ad
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In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.
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Don DeLillo |
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663024c
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Every time she saw a videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept on watching. The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone's, into some distance, out beyond the towers.
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Don DeLillo |
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39bf4c1
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Take the leap, they said. Live the billionaire's myth of immortality. And why not now, I thought. What else was there for Ross to acquire? Give the futurists their blood money and they will make it possible for you to live forever. The pod would be his final shrine of entitlement.
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futurists
cultural-myths
postmodern
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Don DeLillo |
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970cc65
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Like I'm a person and you're a person, which gives you the right to kill me.
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Don DeLillo |
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77b3bee
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You are sure that you are right but you don't want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools.
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Don DeLillo |
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e2fd820
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How stupid these people were, coming into my office unarmed.
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Don DeLillo |
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f608c13
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People weren't saying Oh wow anymore. They were saying No way instead and she wondered if there was something she might learn from this.
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Don DeLillo |
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f2bf9f7
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She was plain except when she laughed. She was someone on the subway. She wore loose skirts and plain shoes and was full-figured and maybe a little clumsy but when she laughed there was a flare in nature, an unfolding of something half hidden and dazzling.
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Don DeLillo |
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70c5c1b
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We still want what we want. We want a haircut.
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Don DeLillo |
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1d6d3f8
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They passed out of the shade beneath the eaves and flew into sunglare and silence and it was an action she only partly saw, elusive and mutely beautiful, the birds so sunstruck they were consumed by light, disembodied, turned into something sheer and fleet and scatter-bright.
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Don DeLillo |
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976a950
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It was the kind of day in which you forget words and drop things and wonder what it is you came into the room to get because you are standing here for a reason and you have to tell yourself it is just a question of sooner or later before you remember because you always remember once you are here. The thing is communicated somehow.
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Don DeLillo |
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88fd400
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You don't believe in heaven? A nun?' 'If you don't, why should I?' 'If you did, maybe I would.' 'If I did, you would not have to.
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Don DeLillo |
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0863346
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Her eyes had to adjust to the night sky. She walked away from the house, out of the spill of electric light, and the sky grew deeper. She watched for a long time and it began to spread and melt and go deeper still, developing strata and magnitudes and light-years in numbers so unapproachable that someone had to invent idiot names to represent the arrays of ones and zeros and powers and dominations because only the bedtime language of childh..
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Don DeLillo |
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9f4fdb9
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This is what long journeys are for. To see what's back behind you, lengthen the view, find the patterns, know the people, consider the significance of one matter or another and then curse yourself or bless yourself or tell yourself, in my father's situation, that you'll have a chance to do it all over again, with variations.
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Don DeLillo |
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42015ae
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What you see is not what wee se. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.
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perceptions-of-reality
perception
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Don DeLillo |
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86c1a8e
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If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought," he said, "the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy."
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Don DeLillo |
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01cfbd5
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He was thinking about automated teller machines. The term was aged and burdened by its own historical memory. It worked at cross-purposes, unable to escape the inferences of fuddled human personnel and jerky moving parts. The term was part of the process that the device was meant to replace. It was anti-futuristic, so cumbrous and mechanical that even the acronym seemed dated.
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Don DeLillo |
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b5ee305
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That night, after the movie, driving my father's car along the country roads, I began to wonder how real the landscape truly was, and how much of a dream is a dream.
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driving
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Don DeLillo |
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170f641
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Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not. [...] To plot, to take aim at something, to shape time and space. This is how we advance the art of human consciousness. (WN 291-2)
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Don DeLillo |
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b3bfff3
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We must be equal to the largeness of things.
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Don DeLillo |
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05b0606
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Is there a fungus that speaks to you? I'm serious. People hear things. They hear God." He meant it. He was serious. He wanted to mean it, to hear anything the man might say, the whole shapeless narrative of his unraveling."
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Don DeLillo |
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dc45a70
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It's the kind of human junk that deepens the landscape, makes it sadder and lonelier and places a vague sad subjective regret at the edge of your response--not regret so much as a sense of time's own esthetic, how strange and still and beautiful a chunk of concrete can be, lived in fleetingly and abandoned, the soul of wilderness signed by men and women passing through.
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Don DeLillo |
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da928a5
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If there is a secular equivalent of standing in a great spired Cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystic light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be watching children in their little bedrooms fast asleep. Girls especially.
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Don DeLillo |
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beb980c
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This is not a story about your disappointment at my silence. The theme of this story is my pain and my attempts to end it.
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Don DeLillo |
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dd6a75e
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I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.
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Don DeLillo |
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6976b2a
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How does a successful television commercial affect the viewer?" "It makes him want to change the way he lives." "In what way?" I said. "It moves him from first person consciousness to third person. In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is ..
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Don DeLillo |
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20bc1ea
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We drove in silence behind a motorboat being towed by a black pickup. I thought of his remarks about matter and being, those long nights on the deck, half smashed, he and I, transcendence, paroxysm, the end of human consciousness. It seemed so much dead echo now. Point omega. A million years away. The omega point has narrowed, here and now, to the point of a knife as it enters a body. All the man's grand themes funneled down to local grief,..
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Don DeLillo |
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3122a7e
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To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity. It seemed a worthwhile goal for prospective saints and flagellants. The new asceticism. All the visionary possibilities of the fast. To feed on the plants and animals of earth. To expand and wallow. I cherished his size, the formlessness of it, the sheer vulgar pleasure, his sense of being overwritten prose. Somehow it was the opposite of death.
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Don DeLillo |
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0161f5e
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His stillness was commanding. I felt myself getting whiter by the second. What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in? I was scared to the marrow. I was cold and hot, dry and wet, myself and someone else. The fist clenched in my chest. I went to the staircase and sat on the top step, looking into my hands. So much remained. Every word and thing a beadwork of bright creation.
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Don DeLillo |
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989ffeb
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What do we have to live for, but each other. What do we have to die for, but our love?
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Don DeLillo |
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28ba77b
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Lekarskite priemni me potiskat poveche i ot bolnitsite zaradi l'khashchata ot tiakh minusova prod'lzhitelnost na zhivota i zaradi sluchainiia patsient, koito si tr'gva s dobri novini, razt'rsva antiseptichnata r'ka na doktora i se smee visoko, smee se na vsiaka negova duma, shche se pr'sne ot smiakh, ot prostashko mog'shchestvo, pokazno ignorira drugite patsienti, preminavaiki prez chakalniata s vse taka d'rz'k smiakh - toi se e ot'rval ot ..
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Don DeLillo |
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e1fb0c4
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People get bitten. But I won't.' I found myself saying, 'You will, you will. These snakes don't know you find death inconceivable. They don't know you're young and strong and you think death applies to everyone but you. They will bite you and you will die.
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youth
snakes
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Don DeLillo |
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819f426
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Maybe he didn't want that life after all, starting over broke, hailing a cab in a busy intersection filled with jockeying junior executives, arms aloft, bodies smartly spinning to cover every compass point. What did he want that was not posthumous? He stared into space. He understood what was missing, the predatory impulse, the sense of large excitation that drove him through his days, the sheer and reeling need to be.
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Don DeLillo |
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abfd9e7
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Even as he printed the words, he imagined people reading them, people moved by his loneliness and disappointment, even by his wretched spelling, the childish mesh of his composition. Let them see the struggle and humiliation, the effort he had to exert to write a simple sentence. The pages were crowded, smudged, urgent, a true picture of his state of mind, of his rage and frustration, knowing a thing but not being able to record it properly..
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Don DeLillo |
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ef87dc4
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Rocks are, but they do not exist.' " After a pause I said, "I came across this statement when I was in college and forgot it until very recently. 'Man alone exists. Rocks are, but they do not exist. Trees are, but they do not exist. Horses are, but they do not exist.' "
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Don DeLillo |
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1e06041
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One must become a book before one can know what is inside it.
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Don DeLillo |
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c85c061
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We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. 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.
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Don DeLillo |
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eb8a11f
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All this optimism, all this booming and soaring. Things happen like bang. This and that simultaneous. I put out my hand and what do I feel? I know there's a thousand things you analyze every ten minutes. Patterns, ratios, indexes, whole maps of information. I love information. This is our sweetness and light. It's a fuckall wonder. And we have meaning in the world. People eat and sleep in the shadow of what we do. But at the same time, what..
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Don DeLillo |
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5681e83
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Some people don't believe in God but they color eggs at Easter just to change the pattern of their days.
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Don DeLillo |
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b695590
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Always the pain, the chaos of composition. He could not find order in the field of little symbols. They were in the hazy distance. He could not clearly see the picture that is called a word. A word is also a picture of a word. He saw spaces, incomplete features, and tried to guess at the rest. He made wild tries at phonetic spelling. But the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make t..
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Don DeLillo |
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02e0dc7
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All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers' plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children's games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.
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politics
love
plots
narrative
plotting
terrorism
don-delillo
white-noise
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Don DeLillo |
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15307c7
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There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.
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Don DeLillo |