Quotes from book

White Noise

“The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.”

“It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.”

“The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.”

“I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own distasters.”

“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”

“The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.”

“He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.”

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

“Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.”

“All plots tend to move deathwards. This is the nature of plots.”

“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.”

“To become a crowd is to keep out death.”