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It's a curious rite of passage, isn't it? Visit the old places. First you wonder how you lived so uncomplainingly in such cramped circumstances. The streets are narrower, the buildings smaller than you ever remembered. It's like coming back to Lilliput.
You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness.
As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.
DON DELILLO, interview, The Paris Review, fall 1993
Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire--not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.
I think fiction recues history from its confusions.
DON DELILLO, South Atlantic Quarterly, 1988
This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.
DON DELILLO, White Noise
Words are not necessary to one's experience of the true life.
I think silence is the condition you accept as the judgment on your crimes.
You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out.... It's what we invented to conceal the terrible secret of our decaying bodies. But it's also life, isn't it? It prolongs life, it provides new organs for those that wear out. New devices, new techniques every day. Lasers, masers, ultrasound. Give yourself up to it.... Believe in it. They'll insert you in a gleaming tube, irradiate your body with the basic stuff of the universe. Light, energy, dreams. God's own goodness.
DON DELILLO, White Noise
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, Libra
Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although I wouldn't say that to a dying man.
DON DELILLO, White Noise
There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?
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