Don DeLillo: Thing

“The prospect of a humane war may be hideous and all the other names you can think of, but it's still a prospect. And as an alternative to all the other things that could happen in the event of war, it's relatively acceptable.”

“If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”

“Facts are lonely things”

“That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.”

“You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”

“Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?'

What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing”

“Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.”

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

“The more things I threw away, the more I found.”

“Sometimes a thing that's hard is hard because you're doing it wrong. (Point Omega)”

“Maybe when we die, the first thing we’ll say is, 'I know this feeling. I was here before.”

“He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.”

“For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.”

“We need time to lose interest in things.”

“The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps even something deeper like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works towards sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true.”

“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.”

“I had centered myself, learning of the existence of an interior motion, a shift in the levels from isolation to solitude to wordlessness to immobility. When Opel occupied that center I became the thing that swirled.”