Underworld Don Delillo Quotes

Longing on a large scale makes history.

The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress.

I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness.

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I'm not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

[We] saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didn't say, What kind of casserole will that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make?

Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.

Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts.

A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.

It's not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.

History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood -- read the speeches of Mussolini -- at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation.

People weren’t saying Oh wow anymore. They were saying No way instead and she wondered if there was something she might learn from this.

slightly older men and women, they had professions and soft slacks with knife pleats and a certain ease of bearing and belonging, the package of attitudes and values known as lifestyle

I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.

How memory conspires with objects of human craft, pressing time flat, inciting a tender reminiscence.

The grasp of objects that bind us to some betokening.

I believed we could know what was happening to us. We were not excluded from our own lives. That is not my head on someone else's body in the photograph that's introduced as evidence. I didn't believe that nations play-act on a grand scale. I lived in the real.

And I knew with total certainty that a protection factor of fifteen was the highest level of sunblock scientifically possible. Now they were selling me a thirty.

Non chiamai Marion. Provai un senso di solitudine, in mancanza di parole migliori, ma in effetti è la parola giusta, una cosa a cui ho sempre cercato di oppormi e da cui sapevo come uscire, ma talvolta anche questo non bastava, e non la chiamai perché non volevo arrendermi, guardando la notte che scendeva.

All these people formed by language and climate and popular songs and breakfast foods and the jokes they tell and the cars they drive have never had anything in common so much as this, that they are sitting in the furrow of destruction.

I pick up the list of Benji's five favorite books because we've got work to do: "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon. He's a pretentious fuck and a liar. "Underworld" by Don DeLillo. He's a snob. "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac. He's a spoiled passport-carrying fuck stunted in eighth grade. "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" by David Foster Wallace. Enough already. "The Red Badge of Courage" by Stephen Crane. He's got Mayflowers in his blood.

Civilization did not rise and flourish as men hammered out hunting scenes on bronze gates and whispered philosophy under the stars, with garbage as a noisome offshoot, swept away and forgotten. No, garbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste, to use what we couldn't discard, to reprocess what we couldn't use. Garbage pushed back.

He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue to being, the way a runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence.

you never consider but might find amazing if you did, how the details of contact, the eye movement and hand waves, the smiles of recognition, the catch-up lives that propel the early dialogue—how this becomes an energy that moves among the guests like a circulating angel, inspiring stories, rumors, flirtations and misconstrued remarks, basically the makings of human history, even

My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simply thinking it. He believed, at thirteen, that the border between himself and the world was thin and porous enough to allow him to affect the course of events. An aircraft in flight was a provocation too strong to ignore. He’d watch a plane gaining altitude after taking off from Sky Harbor and he’d sense an element of catastrophe tacit in the very fact of a flying object filled with people. He was sensitive to the most incidental stimulus and he thought he could feel the object itself yearning to burst. All he had to do was wish the fiery image into his mind and the plane would ignite and shatter. His sister used to tell him, Go ahead, blow it up, let me see you take that plane out of the sky with all two hundred people aboard, and it scared him to hear someone talk this way and it scared her too because she wasn’t completely convinced he could not do it. It’s the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent. But Jeff got older and lost interest and conviction. He lost the paradoxical gift for being separate and alone and yet intimately connected, mind-wired to distant things.

And you keep on looking. You look because this is the nature of the footage, to make a channeled path through time, to give things a shape and a destiny.

Reality doesn't happen until you analyze the dots.

Bemoan technology all you want. It expands your self-esteem and connects you in your well-pressed suit to the things that slip through the world otherwise unperceived.

That's why he was here, to surrender himself to longing, to listen to his host recite the anecdotal texts, all the passed-down stories of bonehead plays and swirling brawls, the pitching duels that carried into twilight, stories that Marvin had been collecting for half a century--the deep eros of memory that separates baseball from other sports.

And what do you remember, finally, when everyone has gone home and the streets are empty of devotion and hope, swept by river wind? Is the memory thin and bitter and does it shame you with its fundamental untruth--all nuance and wishful silhouette? Or does the power of transcendence linger, the sense of an event that violates natural forces, something holy that throbs on the hot horizon, the vision you crave because you need a sign to stand against your doubt?

common words of spark and heart.

Maybe it was the hip-sprung way she moved, high-assed and shiny, alert to surfaces, like a character in a B movie soaked in alimony and gin.

...lonely-chrome America.

The game doesn't change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life.

When hell fills up, the dead will walk the streets.

He drove into the spewing smoke of acres of burning truck tires and the planes descended and the transit cranes stood in rows at the marine terminal and he saw billboards for Hertz and Avis and Chevy Blazer, for Marlboro, Continental and Goodyear, and he realized that all the things around him, the planes taking off and landing, the streaking cars, the tires on the cars, the cigarettes that the drivers of the cars were dousing in their ashtrays--all these were on the billboards around him, systematically linked in some self-referring relationship that had a kind of neurotic tightness, an inescapability, as if the billboards were generating reality...

It’s the kind of human junk that deepens the landscape, makes it sadder and lonelier and places a vague sad subjective regret at the edge of your response—not regret so much as a sense of time’s own esthetic, how strange and still and beautiful a chunk of concrete can be, lived in fleetingly and abandoned, the soul of wilderness signed by men and women passing through.

Il libro si adatta alla mano, si adatta all'individuo. Il modo in cui tieni in mano un libro e giri le pagine, mani e occhi, i movimenti meccanici per rastrellare la ghiaia su una calda strada di campagna, i segni sulla pagina, e come una pagina è uguale alla successiva eppure completamente diversa, le vite nei libri, le colline che diventano verdi, vecchie colline ondulate che ti facevano sentire che stavi diventando un altro.

I know it’s thankless to be sensible in the face of someone’s primitive distrust.

There is only one truth. Whoever controls your eyeballs runs the world.

I'll tell you what I long for, the days of disarray, when I didn't give a damn or a fuck or a farthing.

and the man and the chair went different ways.

Is cyberspace a thing within the world or is it the other way around? Which contains the other, and how can you tell for sure?

Have you ever seen so many people," she whispered, "gathered in one place in order to be rich, powerful and disgusting together?

We saw a cloudwall hung many miles to the east and hawks floating in the unforced motion that makes you think they’ve been up there, the same two birds since bible times.

This is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence.

How children adapt to available surfaces, using curbstones, stoops and manhole covers. How they take the pockmarked world and turn a delicate inversion, making something brainy and rule-bound and smooth, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to repeat the process.

You don't know the connection? You don't know that every privilege in your life and every thought in your mind depends on the ability of the two great powers to hang a threat over the planet?

It's how the news becomes so powerful it doesn't need TV or newspapers. It exists in people's perceptions. It's something they invent, strong enough to seem real. It's the news without the media.

Isn't it possible that this midcentury moment enters the skin more lastingly than the vast shaping strategies of eminent leaders, generals steely in their sunglasses -- the mapped visions that pierce our dreams?

Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the unseen something that haunts the day—men in fedoras and sailors on shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game.

How language is webbed in the senses. Out of sand-blazed brilliance into quirky minds such as his, into touch, taste and fragrance. He thought he'd linger just a bit longer, let the bath take total hold, ease and alleviate, before he put on clothes and entered the complex boxes where people do their living. Nothing fits the body so well as water.

Many things that were anchored to the balance of power and the balance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck. Things have no limits now. Money has no limits. I don’t understand money anymore. Money is undone. Violence is undone, violence is easier now, it’s uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it has no level of values.

Baseball’s oh so simple. You tag a man, he’s out. How different from being it. What spectral genius in the term, that curious part of childhood that sees through the rhymes and nonsense words, past the hidings and seekings and pretendings to something old and dank, some medieval awe, he thought, or earlier, even, that crawls beneath the midnight skin.

I felt the distance and stillness of that sprawled dawn like some endless sky waking inside me, flared against the laughter.

In a country that’s in a hurry to make the future, the names attached to the products are an enduring reassurance.

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.

Sometimes I think everything I’ve done since those years, everything around me in fact, I don’t know if you feel this way but everything is vaguely—what—fictitious.

La preghiera è una strategia pratica, la conquista di un vantaggio temporale nei mercati capitali del Peccato e della Remissione.

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

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.

There is another kind of belief, a second force, insecure, untrusting, a faith that is spring-fed by the things we fear in the night.

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?

It’s the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent.

In the Times every morning, wasn’t it a fact that the obits and the ad column tended to appear on facing pages?

Fuck you. Show some amazement.

And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbor's yard, some kind of kickball maybe, and they speak in your voice, or piggyback races on the weedy lawn, and it's your voice you hear, essentially, under the glimmerglass sky, and you look at the things in the room, offscreen, unwebbed, the tissued grain of the deskwood alive in light, the thick lived tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measures of experience in a random glance, the monk's candle reflected in the slope of the phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl of the braided wick, and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow pencils, skewed all crazy, and the plied lives of the simplest surface, the slabbed butter melting on the crumbled bun, and the yellow of the yellow of the pencils, and you try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world, taking all its meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments out into the streets somehow, its whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence, the tone of hail and farewell, a word that carries the sunlit ardor of an object deep in drenching noon, the argument of binding touch, but it's only a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive--a word that spreads a longing through the raw sprawl of the city and out across the dreaming bournes and orchards to the solitary hills. Peace.

A police car went by with its siren going, a rotary slurping noise, it sounded like the blender in their kitchen—she made fruit shakes compulsively that they felt morally bound to drink.

We're not gonna die We're not gonna die We're not gonna die, leading them in a chant, a mantra that was joyful and mock joyful at the same time because this is New York, New York and we want it both ways.

A naked woman was amazing. He'd never seen it this way, in full light, without half-off clothes or a beach blanket across the lap or sex in a dark car. This was her whole body naked in light, standing and lying and front and back and open and showing and then different when she walked, surer than he was, unclunky and smooth-moving, with parts that didn't bounce. She knew how to be naked. She looked like she'd been raised naked in this room, a skinny girl when she was a girl, probably, and skinny in a certain way, with a little bulgy belly and ashamed of her feet, but grown out of shyness and wrong proportions now, and being married of course, used to being seen, and she didn't have curves and swerves but was good looking naked and stuck to him when they fucked like a thing fighting for light, a great wet papery moth.

He picks up speed and seems to lose his gangliness, the slouchy funk of hormones and unbelonging and all the stammering things that seal his adolescence. He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue to being, the way a runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides bring him into eloquence.

This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It's a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and experience, it's time disguised, it's light-up time, shifting smoky time tricked out as some locus of stable arrangement. When people use that term they're talking about the way things used to be before they moved out here, the way the world used to be, not just New Jersey or South Philly, or before their parents moved, or grandparents, and about the way things still exist in some private relativity theory, some smoky shifting mind dimension, or before the other men and women came this way, the ones in Conestoga wagons, a term we learned in grade school, a back-east term, stemming from the place where the wagons were made.

You don't think of the tape as boring or interesting. It is crude, it is blunt, it is relentless. It is the jostled part of your mind, the film that runs through your hotel brain under all the thoughts you know you're thinking.

DeLillo presents art as the soundest magic against dread, the truest source of radiance and community. Albeit tentatively and ambiguously, Underworld suggests that artists may achieve an accommodation with culture that is also act of resistance. (7)

Then she took of her panties and handed them to me. I tossed them on the bed and got undressed. I felt a breath of estrangement in the room and thought she might be a voyeur of her own experience, living at an angle to the moment and recording in some state of future-mind. But then she pulled me down, snatched a fistful of hair and pulled me into a kiss, and there was a heat in her, a hungry pulse that resembled a gust of being.

Cotter thinks he sees a path to the turnstile on the right. He drains himself of everything he does not need to make the jump. Some are still jumping, some are thinking about it, some need a haircut, some have girlfriends in woolly sweaters and the rest have landed in the ruck and are trying to get up and scatter. A couple of stadium cops are rumbling down the ramp. Cotter sheds these elements as they appear, sheds a thousand waves of information hitting on his skin. His gaze is trained on the iron bars projected from the post. He picks up speed and seems to lose his gangliness, the slouchy funk of hormones and unbelonging and all the stammering things that seal his adolescence. He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue to being, the way a runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence.

mouth cat’s-cradled with filaments of gleaming cheese.

Once you’re a made man, you don’t need the constant living influence of sources outside yourself.

Whiz Co was a firm with an inside track to the future. The Future of Waste.

Carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere. I recall Don DeLillo’s laconic, lethal one-liner from his novel Underworld: ‘What we excrete comes back to consume us.

All that winter I shoveled snow and read books. The lines of print, the alphabetic characters, the strokes of the shovel when I cleared a walk, the linear arrangement of words on a page, the shovel strokes, the rote exercises in school texts, the novels I read, the dictionaries I found in the tiny library, the nature and shape of books, the routine of shovel strokes in the deep snow - this was how I began to build an individual.

It’s not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.

The corporation is supposed to take us outside ourselves. We design these organized bodies to respond to the market, face foursquare into the world. But things tend to drift dimly inward. Gossip, rumor, promotions, personalities, it’s only natural, isn’t it—all the human lapses that take up space in the company soul. But the world persists, the world heals in a way. You feel the contact points around you, the caress of linked grids that give you a sense of order and command.

He sat in the dust with his eyes opened and realized that the sun was rising behind him and wondered what this meant. It meant he’d been facing in the wrong direction all along.

…you could never clean a thing so infinitesimally that it didn’t need to be cleaned again the instant you were done.

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.

And the system pretends to go along, to become more supple and resourceful, less dependent on rigid categories. But even as desire tends to specialize, going silky and intimate, the force of converging markets produces an instantaneous capital that shoots across horizons at the speed of light, making for a certain furtive sameness, a planing away of particulars that affects everything from architecture to leisure time to the way people eat and sleep and dream.

All terror is local now. Some noise on the pavement very near, the stammer of casual rounds from a passing car, someone who carries off your child. Ancient fears revived, they will steal my child, they will come into my house when I’m asleep and cut out my heart because they have a dialogue with Satan.

t is interesting, he says, how weapons reflect the soul of the maker. The Soviets always wanted bigger yield, bigger stockpiles. They had to convince themselves they were a superpower. Throw-weight. What is throw-weight? We don’t know exactly but we agree it sounds like hurled bulk, the hurled will of the collective. Soviet long-range missiles had greater throw-weight. They had to convince themselves with numbers and bulk and mass. “And the U.S.?” I say. Eyes flicking my way, happy as carnival lights. It was the U.S., Viktor says, that designed the neutron bomb. Many buzzing neutrons, very little blast. The perfect capitalist tool. Kill people, spare property.

An incentive.” What a novel idea. “The incentive is within, I think. These materials have no esthetic interest. They’re discolored and crumbling. Old paper, that’s all it is. My customers come here largely for the clutter and mess. It’s a history they feel they’re part of.

Don’t underestimate our capacity for complex longings.

Brian ebbe un attimo di illuminazione. Guardò tutta quella spazzatura in perenne aumento e per la prima volta capì in cosa consistesse il suo lavoro. Non in progettazione o trasporto o riduzione alla fonte. Lui si occupava di comportamento umano, delle abitudini e degli impulsi della gente, dei loro incontrollabili bisogni e innocenti desideri, forse delle loro passioni, sicuramente dei loro eccessi e delle loro debolezze ma anche della loro gentilezza, della loro generosità, e la domanda era come impedire questo metabolismo di massa di sopraffare l'umanità. La discarica gli mostrava senza mezzi termini come finiva il torrente dei rifiuti, dove sfociavano tutti gli appetiti e le brame, i grevi ripensamenti, le cose che si desideravano ardentemente e poi non si volevano più.

è tipico dell'adolescente immaginare la fine del mondo come un accessorio del proprio contesto

He lost the paradoxical gift for being separate and alone and yet intimately connected, mind-wired to distant things.

I didn’t call Marian. I felt a loneliness, for lack of a better word, but that’s the word in fact, a thing I tried never to admit to and knew how to step outside of, but sometimes even this was not means enough, and I didn’t call her because I would not give in, watching the night come down.

A couple of sportsmen taking their ease.

...I want to keep our intentions small and human despite the enormous work we've done and the huge work we have ahead of us and I'm sitting here with a propped foot and talking endlessly about my work when I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.

It is interesting to think of the great blaze of heaven that we winnow down to animal shapes and kitchen tools.

Most of our longings go unfulfilled.