Ratner's Star Quotes

“Shit is universal no matter which language.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to who was capable of understanding the complexity (simplicity) of the problem or the approaches to a tentative solution. There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or "terror in a lonely place," the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind. As a mathematician he was free from subjection to reality, free to impose his ideas and designs on his own test environment. The only valid standard for his work, its critical point (zero or infinity), was the beauty it possessed, the deft strength of his mathematical reasoning. THe work's ultimate value was simply what it revealed about the nature of his intellect. What was at stake, in effect, was his own principle of intelligence or individual consciousness; his identity, in short. This was the infalling trap, the source of art's private involvement with obsession and despair, neither more nor less than the artist's self-containment, a mental state that led to storms of overwork and extended stretches of depression, that brought on indifference to life and at times the need to regurgitate it, to seek the level of expelled matter. Of course, the sense at the end of a serious effort, if the end is reached successfully, is one of lyrical exhilaration. There is air to breathe and a place to stand. The work gradually reveals its attachment to the charged particles of other minds, men now historical, the rediscovered dead; to the main structure of mathematical thought; perhaps even to reality itself, the so-called sum of things. It is possible to stand in time's pinewood dust and admire one's own veronicas and pavanes.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“It was amazing how often kind-looking people turned out to be crazy. He wondered gravely whether things had reached such bad state that only crazy people attempted commonplace acts of kindness, that the crazy and the kind were one and the same.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“We yell and scold as a way of paying homage to each other’s views. This is the burden of friendship between extremely high-strung individuals.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“Sometimes it was hard to say things. Things were so complicated. People might resent what you said. They might use your remarks against you. They might take you seriously and act upon your words, actually do something. They might not even hear you, which perhaps was the only thing worth hoping for. But it was more complicated than that. The sheer effort of speaking. Easier to stay apart, leave things as they are, avoid responsibility for reflecting the world and all its grave weight. Things that should be simple are always hard. But hard things are never easy.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“It’s a Cadillac all right.” “The Rolls-Royce of automobiles,” Ottum”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“Billy tried to imagine the birth of Cyril's wife's baby. It would happen in grim lights violently. A dripping thing trying to clutch to its hole. Dredged up and beaten. Blood and drool and womb mud. How cute, this neon shrieker made to plunge upward, odd-headed blob, this marginal electric glow-thing. Dressed and powdered now. Engineered to abstract design. Cling, suck and cry. Follow with the eye. Gloom and drought of unprotected sleep. Had there been a light in her belly, dim briny light in that pillowing womb, dusk enough to light a page, bacterial smear of light, an amniotic gleam that I could taste, old, deep, wet and warm? Return, return to negative unity.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“There were times when he felt the lure of a submoronic mode of being.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“Billy couldn’t recall ever having seen a blind man laugh”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“Mathematics is what the world is when we subtract our own perceptions.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“There’s a whole class of writers who don’t want their books to be read. This to some extent explains their crazed prose. To express what is expressible isn’t why you write if you’re in this class of writers. To be understood is faintly embarrassing. What you want to express is the violence of your desire not to be read. The friction of an audience is what drives writers crazy. These people are going to read what you write. The more they understand, the crazier you get. You can’t let them know what you’re writing about. Once they know, you’re finished. If you’re in this class, what you have to do is either not publish or make absolutely sure your work leaves readers strewn along the margins. This not only causes literature to happen but is indispensable to your mental health as well.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“Descartes was buried without his right hand.” “What happened to it?” she said. “Someone took it.” “Souvenir?” “Exactly.” “That’s a wonderful story,” she said. “It’ll keep me awake for hours.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“Let’s have sex,” he said. “Take off your clothes and never mind the people here. The people here are working, sleeping, climbing the slopes, camped under tables. To even things up, I will take off my clothes at the same time you are removing yours. This equalizes things.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“There is a life inside this life. A filling of gaps. There is something between the spaces. I am different from this. I am not just this but more. There is something else to me that I don’t know how to reach. Just outside my reach there is something else that belongs to the rest of me. I don’t know what to call it or how to reach it. But it’s there. I am more than you know.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“He smelled, he sweated, he ached. Between himself and his idea of himself there was an area of total silence. What would happen if this space could be filled with some aspect of that collective set of traits that enabled him to qualify as a persisting entity?”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“In the last analysis, moholes are impossible to talk about. What we’re really doing is imposing our own conceptual limitations on a subject that defies inclusion within the borders of our present knowledge. We’re talking around it. We’re making sounds to comfort ourselves. We’re trying to peel skin off a rock. But this, according to Mainwaring, quoting Mohole, is simply what we do to keep from going mad.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“I’m making it fiction.” she said. “The thing that was wrong was that I didn’t really have a book as things stood. It wasn’t willing itself into me, excuse the metaphysics. It was all very forced. But then I realized what I wanted to do and it was frightening. Fiction. I’m going to write fiction.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“All language is innuendo.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“What replaces erotic language? Oral sex, she answered brightly. Tongues wagging in appointed crannies. Lap, pal, left to right. Unsuspecting mouth devoured by the genitals to which it presumes to communicate its moist favors. Defenses must be built to save the lovers from what unfolds around them and then again within their love itself to shelter each from the other’s patent treachery.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“Remember, Willy, the greatest work is both simple and inevitable. That’s”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“Remember the homely old adage: ‘Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“The history of zero is both interesting and informative,” Knobloch read. “It is thought that zero was discovered in India by a Hindu many, many years ago. It is the shadow of pure quantity. On one side of it are the positive integers; semicolon; on the other side the negative integers. Plus and minus, minus and plus.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“Sleep is a very active state, part of your waking life really. At times your heart rate and blood pressure soar. Your neural activity increases. There are rises in spinal fluid pressure and stomach muscle activity. Your little pee-pee-maker gets hard and fluttery. Under closed lids the most important thing of all is happening; your eyes are getting periodic exercise. Their rapid movements are coordinated in terms of conjugate function—a paired mechanism supplying a single vision.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“Our atoms were formed in the dense interiors of supergiant stars billions of years ago. Stars millions of times more luminous than our sun. They broke down and decayed and began to cool. Atoms from these stars are in our bones and nervous systems. We’re stellar cinders, you and me. We come from the beginning or near the beginning. In our brain is the echo of the little bang. This is science, poeticized here and there, and this you can compare with the kabbalistic belief that every person has a sun inside him, a radiant burst of energy.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“A lot of people become deeply involved in their work but only self-taught people experience total murderous obsession.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“I miss the killer instinct of the liberal arts major.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“There is no ultimate number. Mathematics depends on infinity. You can keep on counting forever. It never ends, the number series.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“Sometimes it was hard to say things. Things were so complicated. People might resent what you said. They might use your remarks against you. They might be indifferent to your remarks. They might take you seriously and act upon your words, actually do something. They might not even hear you, which perhaps was the only thing worth hoping for.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“To forget your own existence in the will to persist.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

“If dreams don’t exceed grasp, all human life is futile. Science offers many basic differences between man and animal. We have symbolism, organized speech, self-awareness. We are more often than not repelled by our own vomit. But the most important difference is that man’s dreams exceed his grasp. There is no future for mankind unless this is so.”
― Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star