Skip to content

Death Quotes by Don DeLillo

50 Death quotes by Don DeLillo

All Death quotes Don DeLillo’s page

The force of a death can feel enormous, yet we never truly know the kind of person it claims. DeLillo’s lines hint that fearing death adds a sharp texture to life, while love and loss become sudden, vivid lessons. He also muses on the endless depth that surrounds mortality.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

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

Image

The dead have a presence.

Image

“We're a silver gleaming death machine!”

Image

Isn't death the boundary we need?

Image

Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.

Image

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

Image

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

Image

“It was not Death that stood before me but only Vernon Dickey, my father-in-law.”

Image

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

Image

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

Image

There's never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President.

Image

Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it.

Image

To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its…

Image

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

Image

“Devices make us pliant. We want to please them. The machine was his only hope of deliverance after what he'd done, what…

Image

“Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still…

Image

“Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not…

Image

“This is death. I don't want it to tarry awhile so I can write a monograph. I want it to go away…

Image

A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot.

Image

People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.

Image

The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you've killed or who was…

Image

“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?…

Image

“People get bitten. But I won't.' I found myself saying, 'You will, you will. These snakes don't know you find death inconceivable.…

Image

“It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and…

Image

“I am a bad actor." "Not for me or my camera. I see the person, not some idea he wants to make…

Image

“All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that…

Image

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

Image

This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on…

Image

“I believe, Jack, there are two kinds of people in the world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don't…

Image

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

Image

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

Image

“This is American two-one-three to the cockpit voice recorder. Now we know what it’s like. It is worse than we’d ever imagined.…

Image

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

Image

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

Image

If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

Image

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

Image

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

Image

In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere.

Image

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

Image

A Catholic is raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and if he doesn't live his life in…

Image

Other authors on Death

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. ”