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Life Quotes by Don DeLillo

58 Life quotes by Don DeLillo

All Life quotes Don DeLillo’s page

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, but happens when we are alone, thinking and feeling. Fiction is seen as a way to rescue history and give second chances when reality feels limited. The irony of being the highest life form yet feeling ineffably sad is highlighted.

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Some people fake their death, I'm faking my life.

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The term itself--my life--is a desperate overstatement.

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“Decorative gestures add romance to a life.”

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

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“Sounds like a boring life." "I hope it lasts forever," she said.”

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“...the half-concealed disasters that constitute a life.”

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“The love of minds should last beyond lives.”

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“I would spend the rest of my life turning to speak to her.”

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Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.

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The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of…

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The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a…

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

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“Everything is supposed to be something. But it never is. That's the nature of existence.”

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The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.

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I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction…

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“She wanted this only, to snuff out the pulse of the shaky faith she'd held for much of her life.”

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No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad…

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Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask…

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“Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death.…

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Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers…

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“That's what it all comes down to in the end,' he said. 'A person spends his life saying good-bye to other people.…

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Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?' What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious…

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The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're…

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There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there…

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“The Agency was the one subject in his life that could never be exhausted. Central Intelligence. Beryl saw it as the best…

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The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery,…

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For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of…

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I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living…

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America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local…

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“Maybe he didn't want that life after all, starting over broke, hailing a cab in a busy intersection filled with jockeying junior…

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“I think it's a mistake to lose one's sense of death, even one's fear of death. Isn't death the boundary we need?…

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“There's the life and there's the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print…

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“The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're…

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“Supermarkets this large and clean and modern are a revelation to me. I spent my life in small steamy delicatessens with slanted…

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“Talent is everything. If you've got talent, nothing else matters. You can screw up your personal life something terrible. So what. If…

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“Think of two parallel lines. […] One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President.…

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To plot is to live. […] We start out lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we…

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“There's the life and there's the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print…

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“The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the…

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Words are not necessary to one's experience of the true life.

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More by Don DeLillo

“We all know how the thing we secretly fear is not a secret at all but the open and eternal thing that predicts its…

Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.

The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements.

“As I listened I thought a featureless baggy man was striking me in slow motion with a well-polished stone.”

“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…

“She is beginning to think it is possible that all creation is a spurt of blank matter that chances to make an emerald planet…

“Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief…

“The plane had lost power in all three engines, dropped from thirty-four thousand feet to twelve thousand feet. Something like four miles. When the…

“Grass: I live in a great steel tower that reflects the blazing sun. People catch fire just walking by. The more bodies that pile…

“What people discard could make a nation”

“Marriage is something we make from available materials. In this sense it’s improvised, it’s almost offhand. Maybe this is why we know so little…

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking,…

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a…

“There is no lie in war or preparation of war that can't be defended. ”