Yair’s Reviews > Great Jones Street > Status Update

"Man the primate has been violent for only forty thousand years. What started it was abstract thought. When man started thinking abstractly he advanced from killing for food to killing for words and ideas. Maybe with mindless violence we’re going into a new cycle. No more abstract thought and no more concrete thought. Violence for nothing.”"

-Delillo, Don. Great Jones Street (pg. 191)

"A touch of comic paranoia, I thought. One disguise covering another. The touring clown doubly self-effaced."

-Delillo, Don. Great Jones Street (pg. 177)

"I undressed for the first time in two days, getting into bed naked and weak, unfamiliar with my own body. Fenig began then, taking long and desperate strides, and the soft boy below, Micklewhite’s carnival meat, cried four times in the making of a dream."

-Delillo, Don. Great Jones Street (pg. 136)

"This is what I did. I went back to the window and crossed my arms over my chest, wedging my hands in my armpits. This for warmth. I had been brought up to regard death as an irrevocable state. I tried to reconsider this proposition now, to go over the steps one by one, and I wanted to be warm while I did this."

-Delillo, Don. Great Jones Street (pg. 91)

"If U.S. Guv is involved, the stuff is bound to be a real mind-crusher. Anyway that’s the consensus. People are agog. It’s the dawning of the age of God knows what.”

-Delillo, Don. Great Jones Street (pg. 58)

“Dramatic,” she said.
“What are you doing here?”
“I live here, creepo.”
“But it’s cold, Opel. Dead of winter. I was sure you’d sit out the winter in some timeless land.”
“I’ve got business,” she said.

-Delillo, Don. Great Jones Street. (pg. 52)

"THE ROOM’S TENSIONS were suitable to few enterprises besides my own, that of testing the depths of silence. Or one’s willingness to be silent. Or one’s fear of this willingness."

-Delillo, Don. Great Jones Street (pg. 25)