Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Don DeLillo
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: November 20
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Don Delillo
Donald Richard DeLillo
Love
Death
Rarely
Lurid
Give
Disappear
Thinly
Persons
Shouldn
Unguarded
Person
Bring
Sparing
Self
Working
Abruptly
Take
Suffering
Networks
Giving
Understand
Ruin
Heart
Often
Ruins
Distanced

More quotes by Don DeLillo

Image
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?
Don DeLillo
Image
Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.
Don DeLillo
Image
Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.
Don DeLillo
Image
It's healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line.
Don DeLillo
Image
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.
Don DeLillo
Image
Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.
Don DeLillo
Image
There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.
Don DeLillo
Image
I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.
Don DeLillo
Image
When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.
Don DeLillo
Image
No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.
Don DeLillo
Image
Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun.
Don DeLillo
Image
Off-camera lives are unverifiable.
Don DeLillo
Image
The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
Don DeLillo
Image
I felt myself getting whiter... What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in?
Don DeLillo
Image
The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.
Don DeLillo
Image
Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.
Don DeLillo
Image
I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.
Don DeLillo
Image
What terrorists gain, novelists lose.
Don DeLillo
Image
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
Image
Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets.
Don DeLillo