Home > Work > Underworld

Underworld QUOTES

Underworld QUOTES

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

― Don DeLillo , Underworld

2 " 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. "

― Don DeLillo , Underworld

3 " 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. "

― Don DeLillo , Underworld

4 " 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. "

― Don DeLillo , Underworld

5 " 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. "

― Don DeLillo , Underworld

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

― Don DeLillo , Underworld

7 " 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. "

― Don DeLillo , Underworld

8 " 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. "

― Don DeLillo , Underworld

9 " 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. "

― Don DeLillo , Underworld

10 " 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. "

― Don DeLillo , Underworld

11 " 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. "

― Don DeLillo , Underworld

12 " common words of spark and heart. "

― Don DeLillo , Underworld

13 " 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? "

― Don DeLillo , Underworld

14 " 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. "

― Don DeLillo , Underworld

15 " Reality doesn't happen until you analyze the dots. "

― Don DeLillo , Underworld

16 " 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. "

― Don DeLillo , Underworld

17 " ...lonely-chrome America. "

― Don DeLillo , Underworld

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

― Don DeLillo , Underworld

19 " 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. "

― Don DeLillo , Underworld

20 " 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? "

― Don DeLillo , Underworld