Cosmopolis Quotes

“There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“Talent is more erotic when it's wasted.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“When he died he would not end. The world would end.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“it's not the sex you think I've had. it's the sex i want. that's what you smell on me. because the more I look at you, the more A know about us both. And the more A want to have sex with you. because there's a certain kind of sex that has an element of cleansing. it's the antidote to disillusion. the counterpoison.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“The instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“I want to bottle-fuck you slowly with my sunglasses on.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next.
But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing
these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections,
finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things.
I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“Sex finds us. Sex sees through us. That's why it's so shattering. It strips us of appearances.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours, man-hours, using labor more efficiently.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“why something and not nothing? why music and not noise?”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“Time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential. The future becomes insistent.

"This is why something will happen soon, maybe today…to correct the acceleration of time. Bring nature back to normal, more or less.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“Explain me to myself, you’ll make me choke on my lunch. Feel sympathy for me, I’ll puke monkey blood on your understated shoes.”
― Don DeLillo, Valparaiso

“People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It's simply how we live.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“Freud is finished, Einstein's next.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there,' she said. 'This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“Off-camera lives are unverifiable.”
― Don DeLillo, Valparaiso

“You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels."
"Its own grave-diggers," he said.
"But these are not the grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people are a fantasy generated by the market. They don't exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside."
The camera tracked a cop chasing a young man through the crowd, an image that seemed to exist at some drifting distance from the moment.
"The market culture is total. It breeds these men and women. They are necessary to the system they despise. They give it energy and definition. They are market-driven. They are traded on the markets of the world. This is why they exist, to invigorate and perpetuate the system.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear.

Eric Packer about Vija Kinski”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis