#don delillo

[thoughtkick]

How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?

Don DeLillo

[quotespile]

My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simply thinking it. He believed, at thirteen, that the border between himself and the world was thin and porous enough to allow him to affect the course of events. An aircraft in flight was a provocation too strong to ignore. He’d watch a plane gaining altitude after taking off from Sky Harbor and he’d sense an element of catastrophe tacit in the very fact of a flying object filled with people. He was sensitive to the most incidental stimulus and he thought he could feel the object itself yearning to burst. All he had to do was wish the fiery image into his mind and the plane would ignite and shatter. His sister used to tell him, Go ahead, blow it up, let me see you take that plane out of the sky with all two hundred people aboard, and it scared him to hear someone talk this way and it scared her too because she wasn’t completely convinced he could not do it. It’s the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent.

Don DeLillo, Underworld

[surqrised]

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

Don DeLillo, White Noise

[sacredwhores]

David Cronenberg - Cosmopolis (2012)

[riverbird]

"Sometimes the call of a bird is so clear it bruises my hands." Joanna Klink, from The Graves

"When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see." Don DeLillo, The Body Artist "A bird is a vessel. It carries a field." Emily Skaja, from It's Impossible to Keep White Moths

[perfectquote]

How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?

Don DeLillo

[thehopefulquotes]

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

Don DeLillo, White Noise

[thewomanwithmissingfingers]

Beauty is dangerous in narrow times, a knife in the slender neck of the rational man, and only those who live between the layers of these strange days can know its name and shape.

Great Jones Street, Don DeLillo, 1973

[litsnaps]

[withnailrules]

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

—Don DeLillo

[thoughtkick]

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

Don DeLillo, White Noise

[quotespile]

The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw.

Don DeLillo, Point Omega

[surqrised]

How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?

Don DeLillo

[edwardian-girl-next-door]

"It was the time of year, the time of day, for small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone."

~ Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)

[dk-thrive]

something subterranean is forming, a literal dream that comes out of daydreaming

Don DeLillo, interviewed by David Remnick in the New Yorker: 'Between Books,' he says, 'what happens in between is I drift, I feel a little aimless. I feel a little stupid, because my mind is at odds. It’s not trained on a daily basis to concentrate on something, so I feel a little dumb. Time passes in a completely different way. I can’t account for a day, a given day. At the end of a day, I don’t know what I did.” The work, when it starts, 'comes out of all the time a writer wastes. We stand around, look out the window, walk down the hall, come back to the page, and in those intervals, something subterranean is forming, a literal dream that comes out of daydreaming.'

— Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Diaries 1995-1998 (The Text Publishing Company, 2021)

[perfectquote]

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

Don DeLillo, White Noise