“Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“That which we fear to touch is often the very fabric of our salvation. ”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It is the sum total of the things they aren't telling us.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“The truth of the world is exhausting.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“There is a world inside the world.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“A fact is innocent until someone wants it; then it become intelligence.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“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, quote from Libra
“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. We've set it loose. We've opened up the ground and here it is. He took Interstate 45 south. He didn't want them to kill Leon. He felt a saturating sense of death, a dread in the soft filling of his bones, the suckable part, approaching Galveston now.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“Think of two parallel lines. […] One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny. - David Ferrie (339)”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“That clean but lonely feeling when there are no other cars. The traffic lights changing just for you.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything. It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate picture. Then he is upside down. Then he is right side up. You shoot at a series of images conveyed to you through a metal tube. The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you’ve killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it’s ordinary murder.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“There is enough mystery in the facts as we know them, enough of conspiracy, coincidence, loose ends, dead ends, multiple interpretations. There is no need […] to invent the grand and masterful scheme, the plot that reaches flawlessly in a dozen directions. - Agent Branch (58)”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“[Lee Oswald] saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history, he and his mother, locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law. The books made him part of something. Something led up to his presence in this room, in this particular skin, and something would follow. Men in small rooms. Men reading and waiting, struggling with secret and feverish ideas. (41)”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail. (148)”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“Secrets are an exalted state, almost a dream state. They're a way of arresting motion, stopping the world so we can see ourselves in it.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the .45 to even things up.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“When Lee has a certain look on his face, eyes kind of amused, mouth small and tight, he finds himself thinking of his father. He believes it is a look his father may have used. It feels like his father. A curious sensation, the look coming upon him, taking hold in an unmistakable way, and then his old man is here, eerie and forceful and whole, a meeting across worlds.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“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.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“A word is also a picture of a word.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“The falling away of things we carry around with us, twilight and chimney smoke.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“Is he one of them now? Frustrated, stuck, self-watching, looking for a means of connection, a way to break out. After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“L'azione è verità, e la verità vacilla quando la guerra finisce e gli abitanti del villaggio sono liberi di tornare ai loro campi. Sopravviviamo, e siamo nuovamente sconfitti.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“Some people don't believe in God but they color eggs at Easter just to change the pattern of their days.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“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 them right. The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“Tutto dovrebbe essere qualcosa. Ma non lo è mai. È la natura dell'esistenza.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
“The Agency was the one subject in his life that could never be exhausted. Central Intelligence. Beryl saw it as the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from Libra
Don DeLillo
Born place: in Bronx, New York, The United States
Born date November 20, 1936
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“I've taken the liberty of giving us a full moon. I've arranged for all stoplights to stay green. I've made some phone calls to make sure you keep smiling. I've reserved the space underneath our feet. I've gone all out for you, so why don't you go with me?”
― quote from Torture the Artist. Joey Goebel
“A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.”
― David Eagleman, quote from Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
“You're not the same as you were before," he said. You were much more... muchier... you've lost your muchness.”
― Lewis Carroll, quote from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
“This is why, rather than go on talking, I felt the need to transform the things to be said into a cone of light hurled at a hundred miles an hour, to transform myself into this cone of light moving over the superhighway, because it is certain that such a signal can be received and understood by her without being lost in the ambiguous disorder of secondary vibrations, just as I, to receive and understand the things she has to say to me, would like them to be only (rather, I would like her to be only) this cone of light I see advancing on the superhighway at a speed (I'm guessing, at a glance) of eighty or ninety. What counts is communicating the indispensable, skipping all the superfluous, reducing ourselves to essential communication, to a luminous signal that moves in a given direction, abolishing the complexity of our personalities and situations and facial expressions, leaving them in the shadowy container that the headlights carry behind them and conceal. The Y I love is really that moving band of luminous rays, and all the rest of her can remain implicit; and the me that she can love, the me that has the power of entering that circuit of exaltation which is her affective life, in the flashing of this pass which, through love of her and with a certain risk, I am now attempting.”
― Italo Calvino, quote from The Complete Cosmicomics
“India is a place where colour is doubly bright. Pinks that scald your eyes, blues you could drown in.”
― Kiran Millwood Hargrave, quote from The Girl of Ink and Stars
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