The Body Artist Quotes

“When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“Coming and going I am leaving. I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left. Because I am here and where. And I will go or not or never. And I have seen what I will see. If I am where I will be. Because nothing comes between me.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“He said, "The word for moonlight is moonlight.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping. ”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see. Think. What a shedding of every knowable surface and process. She wanted to believe the bird was seeing her, a woman with a teacup in her hand, and never mind the folding back of day and night, the apparition of a space set off from time. She looked and took a careful breath. She was alert to the clarity of the moment but knew it was ending already. She felt it in the blue jay. Or maybe not. She was making it happen herself because she could not look any longer. This must be what it means to see if you've been near blind all your life. She said something to Rey, who lifted his head slightly, chasing the jay but leaving the sparrows unstartled.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“It was agreeable to her, the smell of tobacco. It was part of her knowledge of his body. It was the aura of the man, a residue of smoke and unbroken habit, a dimension in the night, and she lapped it off the curled gray hairs on his chest and tasted it in his mouth. It was who he was in the dark, cigarettes and mumbled sleep and a hundred other things nameable and not.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“What did it mean, the first time, a thinking creature looked deeply into another's eyes? Did it take a hundred thousand years before this happened or it was the first thing they did, transcendingly, the thing that made them higher, made them modern, the gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in our souls?”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“It was necessary because she needed to do it. This is what made it necessary.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“But you have to direct yourself out of this thing, not into it. Don't fold up.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“Her eyes had to adjust to the night sky. She walked away from the house, out of the spill of electric light, and the sky grew deeper. She watched for a long time and it began to spread and melt and go deeper still, developing strata and magnitudes and light-years in numbers so unapproachable that someone had to invent idiot names to represent the arrays of ones and zeros and powers and dominations because only the bedtime language of childhood can save us from awe and shame.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“It was the kind of day in which you forget words and drop things and wonder what it is you came into the room to get because you are standing here for a reason and you have to tell yourself it is just a question of sooner or later before you remember because you always remember once you are here.

The thing is communicated somehow.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“They passed out of the shade beneath the eaves and flew into sunglare and silence and it was an action she only partly saw, elusive and mutely beautiful, the birds so sunstruck they were consumed by light, disembodied, turned into something sheer and fleet and scatter-bright.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach?
Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“When she started back she saw a blue jay perched atop the feeder. She stopped dead and held her breath. It stood large and polished and looked royally remote from the other birds busy feeding and she could nearly believe she'd never seen a jay before. It stood enormous, looking in at her, seeing whatever it saw, and she wanted to tell Rey to look up. She watched it, black-barred across the wings and tail, and she thought she'd somehow only now learned how to look. She'd never seen a thing so clearly and it was not simply because the jay was posted where it was, close enough for her to note the details of cresting and color. There was also the clean shock of its appearance among the smaller brownish birds, its mineral blue and muted blue and broad dark neckband. But if Rey looked up, the bird would fly.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“He said, "The word for moonlight is moonlight."

This made her happy. It was logically complex and oddly moving and circularly beautiful and true - or maybe not so circular but straight as straight can be.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“But it can't be true that he drifts from one reality to another, independent of the logic of time. This is not possible. You are made out of time. This is the force that tells you who you are. Close your eyes and feel it. It is time that defines your existence.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“She liked to think. What did she like to think? She was having a dumb day and wanted to blame the fog.
Maybe he falls, he slides, if that is a useful word, from his experience of an objective world, the deepest description of space-time, where he does not feel a sense of future direction - he slides into her experience, everyone's, the standard sun-kissed chronology of events.
Am I the first human to abduct an alien?”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“Vokspapiret ble skilt fra rullen i et rat-a-tat-forløp, krøp langs den hakkete kanten på esken, og hun hørte det nedover ryggraden, tenkte hun.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“The plan is to organize time until she can live again”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“Maybe there are times when we slide into another reality but can't remember it, can't concede the truth of it because this would be too devastating to absorb.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“She folded a section of newspaper and read a line or two and read some more or didn't, sipping tea and drifting.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“How much time is a long time? Could be this, could be that.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“Because smoke rolled out of the hollows in the wooded hills and the ferns were burnt brown by time. There was a sternness of judgment in the barrens, shades of flamed earth under darkish skies, and in the boulders sea-strewn at the edge of the pine woods, an old stony temper, a rigor of oath-taking and obduracy.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“She thought she saw a bird. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something rise past the window, eerie and bird-like but maybe not a bird. She looked and it was a bird, its flight line perfectly vertical, its streaked brown body horizontal, wings calmly stroking, a sparrow not wind-hovering but generating lift and then instantly gone.

She saw it mostly in retrospect because she didn't know what she was seeing at first and had to re-create the ghostly moment, write it like a line in a piece of fiction, and maybe it wasn't a sparrow at all but a smaller bird, gray and not brown and spotted and not streaked but not as small as a hummingbird, and how would she ever know for sure unless it happened again, and even then, she thought, and even then again.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“When the phone rang she did not look at it the way they do in the movies. Real people don't look at ringing phones.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“She looked past the bowl into a space inside her head that was also here in front of her.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“She took a bite of cereal and forgot to taste it. She lost the taste somewhere between the time she put the food in her mouth and the regretful second she swallowed it.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist