Don DeLillo

Quotes

1. He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.

2. 

   The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

3. 

   The nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe." "As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe...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.

4. 

   I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.

5. 

   The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.

6. 

   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 heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.

7. 

   It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.

8. 

   Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.

9. 

   “Don’t you know about all those theorems that say nothing is what it seems? There’s no past, present, or future outside our own mind. The so-called laws of motion are a big hoax.” – Heinrich

10. 

    “Terrifying data is now an industry in itself. Different firms compete to see how badly they can scare us.” – Jack

11. 

    "All the old muddles and quirks," I said. "Faith, religion, life everlasting. The great old human gullibilities. Are you saying that you don't take them seriously? Your dedication is a pretense?"

12. 

    May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan.