Great Jones Street Quotes

“Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.”
― Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street

“Everybody knows the thing about an infinite number of monkeys," Fenig said. "An infinite number of monkeys is put to work at an infinite number of typewriters and eventually one of them reproduces a great work of literature. In what language I don't know. But what about an infinite number of writers in an infinite number of cages? Would they make on monkey sound? One genuine chimp noise? Would they eventually swing by their toes from an infinite number of monkey bars? Would they shit monkey shit? It's academic, you say. You may be right.”
― Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street

“I went to the room in Great Jones Street, a small crooked room, cold as a penny, looking out on warehouses, trucks and rubble. There was snow on the windowledge. Some rags and an unloved ruffled shirt of mine had been stuffed into places where the window frame was warped and cold air entered. The refrigerator was unplugged, full of record albums, tapes, and old magazines. I went to the sink and turned on both taps all the way, drawing an intermittent trickle. Least is best. I tried the radio, picking up AM only at the top of the dial, FM not at all."

The industrial loft buildings along Great Jones seemed misproportioned, broad structures half as tall as they should have been, as if deprived of light by the great skyscraper ranges to the north and south."

Transparanoia owns this building," he said.

She wanted to be lead singer in a coke-snorting hard-rock band but was prepared to be content beating a tambourine at studio parties. Her mind was exceptional, a fact she preferred to ignore. All she desired was the brute electricity of that sound. To make the men who made it. To keep moving. To forget everything. To be that sound. That was the only tide she heeded. She wanted to exist as music does, nowhere, beyond maps of language. Opal knew almost every important figure in the business, in the culture, in the various subcultures. But she had no talent as a performer, not the slightest, and so drifted along the jet trajectories from band to band, keeping near the fervers of her love, that obliterating sound, until we met eventually in Mexico, in somebody's sister's bed, where the tiny surprise of her name, dropping like a pebble on chrome, brought our incoherent night to proper conclusion, the first of all the rest, transactions in reciprocal tourism.
She was beautiful in a neutral way, emitting no light, defining herself in terms of attrition, a skinny thing, near blond, far beyond recall from the hard-edged rhythms of her life, Southwestern woman, hard to remember and forget...There was never a moment between us that did not measure the extent of our true connection. To go harder, take more, die first.”
― Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street

“Why are free spirits always so fucking dumb?”
― Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street

“Television. Maybe it was all a study in the art of mummification. The effect of the medium is so evanescent that those who work in its time apparatus feel the need to preserve themselves, delivering their bodies to be lacquered and trussed, sprayed with the rarest of pressurized jellies, all to one end, a release from the perilous context of time. This is their only vanity, to expect to dwell forever in hermetic sub-corridors, free of every ravage, secure as old kings asleep in sodium.”
― Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street

“If you could stretch a given minute, what would you find between its unstuck components? Probably some kind of astral madness. A bleak comprehension of the final size of things.”
― Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street

“The love of minds should last beyond lives.”
― Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street

“What do we have to live for, but each other. What do we have to die for, but our love?”
― Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street

“Maybe that was the answer I needed, the one route back. So simple. To decide to love the age.”
― Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street

“Any curly-haired boy can write windswept ballads. You have to crush people's heads. That's the only way to make those fuckers listen.”
― Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street

“As I listened I thought a featureless baggy man was striking me in slow motion with a well-polished stone.”
― Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street

“It was an evil thing to consider, allying myself with the barest parts of mass awareness, land policed by the king’s linguists, by technicians in death-system control, corporate disease consultants, profiteers of the fetus industry.”
― Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street