White Noise

by Don DeLillo

She said I made virtues of her flaws because it was my nature to shelter loved ones from the truth. Something lurked inside the truth, she said.

Shouldn’t death, I thought, be a swan dive, graceful, white-winged and smooth, leaving the surface undisturbed?

“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.”

Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another’s care and protection.

I was living, in short, on the edge of a landscape of vast shame.

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in a mass of advancing lava. Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.

People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.

He inhaled food according to aerodynamic principles. Pressure differences, intake velocities.