Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” Quotes (48 Quotes)

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

The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.

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.

Look past the violence. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.

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.

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.

Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another's care and protection.

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

He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.

ManÆs guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.

Their bumper sticker read GUN CONTROL IS MIND CONTROL. In situations like this, you want to stick close to people in right-wing fringe groups.

Her death would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. Don't let us die, I want to cry out to that fifth-century sky ablaze with mystery and spiral light. Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver-spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you?

Murray said, ?I don?t trust anybody?s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It?s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.?

There are no amateurs in the world of children.

His stillness was commanding. I felt myself getting whiter by the second. What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in? I was scared to the marrow. I was cold and hot, dry and wet, myself and someone else. The fist clenched in my chest. I went to the staircase and sat on the top step, looking into my hands. So much remained. Every word and thing a beadwork of bright creation.

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.

These were the things that built the world. Not to know or care about them was a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender, of species. What could be more useless than a man who couldn't fix a dripping faucetùfundamentally useless, dead to history, to the messages in his genes? I wasn't sure I disagreed.

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

Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.

TheyÆve grown comfortable with their money,Æ I said. æThey genuinely believe theyÆre entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.

I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.

She was shining a light on us, she was coming into being, endlessly being formed and reformed as the muscles in her face worked at smiling and speaking, as the electronic dots swarmed.

We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now.

If you don't have the grace and wit to die early, you are forced to vanish, to hide as if in shame and apology.

Silvery dancing strands that seemed the pure play of light, light as evanescent news, ideas borne on light.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

I'm not just a college professor. I'm the head of a department. I don't see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That's for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are.

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

We're a silver gleaming death machine!

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.

Something lurked inside the truth.

When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.

Is this a mild winter or a harsh winter?

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.

Ample women do not plan such things. They lack the guile for conspiracies of the body.

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.

The art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way.

Another one says she has asnap-off crotch. What do you think she means by that? I'm a little worried,though, about all these outbreaks of lifestyle diseases. I carry a reinforced ribbed condom at all times. One size fits all. But I have a feeling it's not much protection against the intelligence and adaptability of the modern virus.

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

The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.

Decorative gestures add romance to a life.

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 greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.

Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.

It's like World War III. Everything is white. They'll take our bright colors away and use them in the war effort.

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.