Quote

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

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
Moving
Wordless
Sometimes
Linger
Long
Shock
Something
Supposed
Love
Wear
Stay
Trust
Leave

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A dead afternoon in a dark bar was not the worst of fates.
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Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?
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Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.
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Because friends have to be brutally honest with each other. I'd feel terrible if I didn't tell you what I was thinking, especially at a time like this
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A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.
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Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun.
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I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.
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You gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.
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First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there's a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger.
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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.
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Naturally a direct comparison of terrorist and novelist is complete nonsense. But there was once a time when the novelist also had some influence on how his contemporaries thought, the way they saw the world, the way they lived.
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And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?
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In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.
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American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.
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The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.
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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.
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Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.
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The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here.
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The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?
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Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.
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