White Noise

by Don DeLillo

“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”

“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”

“All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.” Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean?

Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.

The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error.

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream. May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan.

No sense of the irony of human existence, 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.

I don’t see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That’s for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are.”

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

Most of us have probably seen our own death but haven’t known how to make the material surface. Maybe when we die, the first thing we’ll say is, ‘I know this feeling. I was here before.’

I did what I had to do. I was remote. I was operating outside myself. It was a capitalist transaction. You cherish the wife who tells you everything. I am doing my best to be that person.”

“I have no body. I’m only a mind or a self, alone in a vast space.”

Look past the violence, Jack. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.”

“Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.”

“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 the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.”

“We’re serious people here. The cycle of history has but four ages. We happen to be in the last of these. There is little time for whimsy.”

I’ll tell you what the afterlife is. It’s a sweet and terribly touching idea. You can take it or leave it. In the meantime what you have to do is survive an assassination attempt. That would be an instant tonic. You would feel specially favored, you would grow in charisma.”

“A person spends his life saying good-bye to other people. How does he say good-bye to himself?”

Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.