Top 500 Don DeLillo Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.”

— Don DeLillo

52. “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.”

— Don DeLillo

53. “America was and is the immigrant’s dream.”

— Don DeLillo

54. “Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.”

— Don DeLillo

55. “Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.”

— Don DeLillo

56. “Objects are what we aren’t, what we can’t extend ourselves to be. Do people make things to define the boundaries of the self? Objects are the limits we desperately need. They show us where we end. They dispel our sadness, temporarily.”

— Don DeLillo

57. “You are sure that you are right but you don’t want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools.”

— Don DeLillo

58. “Evil is movement towards void.”

— Don DeLillo

59. “There are no amateurs in the world of children.”

— Don DeLillo

60. “To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It’s the drowning out of false voices.”

— Don DeLillo

61. “Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.”

— Don DeLillo

62. “We surrounded ourselves with smoke and loud noise. That’s the way we chose to live. I’m prepared to defend it.”

— Don DeLillo

63. “I’m not reclusive at all. Just private.”

— Don DeLillo

64. “Sleep was out there somewhere over the curve of the earth.”

— Don DeLillo

65. “I move past the scaffolding and walk down the steps, hearing one language after another, rich, harsh, mysterious, strong. This is what we bring to the temple, not prayer or chant or slaughtered rams. Our offering is language.”

— Don DeLillo

66. “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.”

— Don DeLillo

67. “Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.”

— Don DeLillo

68. “Famous people don’t want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there’s something crawling in their clothes.”

— Don DeLillo

69. “Clouds are no deterrent. Clouds intensify the drama, trap and shape the light.”

— Don DeLillo

70. “News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before – what? I don’t know. But you’re smart to trap us in your camera before we disappear.”

— Don DeLillo

71. “The world is shrinking into a kind of technological funnel. I think people are drawn into their technological devices, and this becomes a kind of subjective universe, into which much of the rest of the world simply does not enter.”

— Don DeLillo

72. “Stories have no point if they don’t absorb our terror.”

— Don DeLillo

73. “She is beginning to think it is possible that all creation is a spurt of blank matter that chances to make an emerald planet here, a dead star there, with random waste between.”

— Don DeLillo

74. “I slept for four years. I didn’t study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.”

— Don DeLillo

75. “Technology is crucial to civilization why? Because it helps us make our fate. We don’t need God or miracles or the flight of the bumble bee. But it is also crouched and undecidable. It can go either way.”

— Don DeLillo

76. “It’s no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture.”

— Don DeLillo

77. “The dead have come to take the living. The dead in winding-sheets, the regimented dead on horseback, the skeleton that plays the hurdy-gurdy.”

— Don DeLillo

78. “In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too.”

— Don DeLillo

79. “The ruins stood above the hissing traffic like some monument to doomed expectations.”

— Don DeLillo

80. “Pause for a moment, you wretched weakling, and take stock of yourself.”

— Don DeLillo

81. “I marched and I protested against the war in Vietnam, along with many, many thousands of others. But I never quite understood the bombs that were placed in science labs or office buildings.”

— Don DeLillo

82. “California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.”

— Don DeLillo

83. “What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

85. “Say heat. Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously, I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered.”

— Don DeLillo

86. “I’ve always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.”

— Don DeLillo

87. “It just means you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that.”

— Don DeLillo

88. “May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan.”

— Don DeLillo

89. “Choice is a subtle form of disease.”

— Don DeLillo

90. “Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I’m a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.”

— Don DeLillo

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

— Don DeLillo

92. “Music is dangerous in so many ways. It’s the most dangerous thing in the world.”

— Don DeLillo

93. “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.”

— Don DeLillo

94. “Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the sombre renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings.”

— Don DeLillo

95. “That’s the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.”

— Don DeLillo

96. “Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.”

— Don DeLillo

97. “Let’s enjoy these aimless days while we cam, I told myself, fearing some kind of deft acceleration.”

— Don DeLillo

98. “The long soft life is what I feel I’m settling into and the only question is how deadly it will turn out to be. But.”

— Don DeLillo

99. “Because friends have to be brutally honest with each other. I’d feel terrible if I didn’t tell you what I was thinking, especially at a time like this.”

— Don DeLillo

100. “And what’s the point of waking up in the morning if you don’t try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?”

— Don DeLillo