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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.

Don DeLillo

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Don DeLillo
Age: 87
Born: 1936
Born: November 20
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Don Delillo
Donald Richard DeLillo
Thinking
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Solely
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Asleep
Energy
Presence
Dream
Ground
Also
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Perhaps
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Dead
Crumbling
Think
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More quotes by Don DeLillo

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Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.
Don DeLillo
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Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
Don DeLillo
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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
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There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.
Don DeLillo
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I've always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.
Don DeLillo
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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
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If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
Don DeLillo
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...Because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond necessity.
Don DeLillo
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I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore
Don DeLillo
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Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.
Don DeLillo
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The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.
Don DeLillo
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What terrorists gain, novelists lose.
Don DeLillo
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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.
Don DeLillo
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I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.
Don DeLillo
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All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.
Don DeLillo
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Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.
Don DeLillo
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To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity.
Don DeLillo
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A Catholic is raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and if he doesn't live his life in a certain way, this death is an introduction to an eternity of pain.
Don DeLillo
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the instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms
Don DeLillo
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I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.
Don DeLillo