White Noise

by Don DeLillo

But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die and then go on to experience uterine rebirth or Judeo-Christian afterlife or out-of-body experience or a trip on a UFO or whatever we wish to call it.

If you don’t have the grace and wit to die early, you are forced to vanish, to hide as if in shame and apology.

The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.

What people in an exodus fear most immediately is that those in positions of authority will long since have fled, leaving us in charge of our own chaos.

I liked being with Wilder. The world was a series of fleeting gratifications. He took what he could, then immediately forgot it in the rush of a subsequent pleasure. It was this forgetfulness I envied and admired.

This must be how people escape the pull of the earth, the gravitational leaf-flutter that brings us hourly closer to dying. Simply stop obeying.

Is it better to commit evil and attempt to balance it with an exalted act than to live a resolutely neutral life?