Américana Quotes

“It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams. ― Don DeLillo, Americana (ACTES SUD; 0 edition, August 10, 1993)”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory. ”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“Talent is everything. If you've got talent, nothing else matters. You can screw up your personal life something terrible. So what. If you've got talent, it's there in reserve. Anybody who has talent they know they have it and that's it. It's what makes you what you are. It tells you you're you. Talent is everything; sanity is nothing. I'm convinced of it. I think I had something once. I showed promise, didn't I? But I was too sane. I couldn't make the leap out of my own soul into the soul of the universe. That's the leap they all made. From Blake to Rimbaud. I don't write anything but checks. I read science fiction. I go on business trips to South Bend and Rochester. The one in Minnesota. Not Rochester, New York. Rochester, Minnesota. I couldn't make the leap.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy. ”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“She was the one, I decided, who would guide me into the vortex of the cliche.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“Now this girl was about twenty-one years old. A sweet little coed. Spends a night with a married man. Goes home the next day and tells her mama and daddy. Don’t ask me why. Maybe just to rub their faces in it. They decide she needs a lesson. Whole family drives out into the desert, right out to that spot we just passed. All three of them plus the girl’s pet dog. Papa tells the girl to dig a shallow grave. Mama gets down on her hands and knees and holds the dog by the collar. When the girl is all through digging, papa gives her a .22 caliber revolver and tells her to shoot the dog. A real touching family scene. Make a good calendar for some religious group to give away. The girl puts the weapon to her temple and kills herself. Now isn’t that a heartwarming story? Restores my faith in just about everything.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“One must become a book before one can know what is inside it.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“...it occurred to me that perhaps in this city the crowd was essential to the individual; without it, he had nothing against which to scrape his anger, no echo for grief, and not the slightest proof that there were others more lonely than he. it was just a passing thought.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“The whole country's going to puke blood when they read it.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“Once out of the mailroom, I began to learn more about fear. As soon
as fear begins to ascend, anatomically, from the pit of the stomach to the
throat and brain, from fear of violence to the more nameless kind, you
come to believe you are part of a horrible experiment. I learned to
distrust those superiors who encouraged independent thinking. When you
gave it to them, they returned it in the form of terror, for they knew
that ideas, only that, could hasten their obsolescence. Management asked
for new ideas all the time; memos circulated down the echelons, requesting
bold and challenging concepts. But I learned that new ideas could finish
you unless you wrapped them in a plastic bag. I learned that most of the
secretaries were more intelligent than most of the executives and that the
executive secretaries were to be feared more than anyone. I learned what
closed doors meant and that friendship was not negotiable currency and how
important it was to lie even when there was no need to lie. Words and
meanings were at odds. Words did not say what was being said nor even its
reverse. I learned to speak a new language and soon mastered the special
elements of that tongue.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“I couldn't help suspecting I had manufactured the whole thing, my need for him, simply to avoid what I considered to be the alternatives. This is one of my very annoying traits. I can't sit back and let something grow of its own momentum and eventually reveal its truth or horror. I must probe it from the outset.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“We surrounded ourselves with smoke and loud noise. That's the way we chose to live. I'm prepared to defend it.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“That night, after the movie, driving my father's car along the country roads, I began to wonder how real the landscape truly was, and how much of a dream is a dream.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“I saw a group of women standing by a station wagon. There were seven of them, pushing cartons and shopping bags over the open tailgate into the rear of the car. Celery stalks and boxes of Gleem stuck out of the bags. I took the camera from my lap, raised it to my eye, leaned out the window a bit, and trained it on the ladies as if I were shooting. One of them saw me and immediately nudged her companion but without taking her eyes off the camera. They waved. One by one the others reacted. They all smiled and waved. They seemed supremely happy. Maybe they sensed that they were waving at themselves, waving in the hope that someday if evidence is demanded of their passage through time, demanded by their own doubts, a moment might be recalled when they stood in a dazzling plaza in the sun and were registered on the transparent plastic ribbon; and thirty years away, on that day when proof is needed, it could be hoped that their film is being projected on a screen somewhere, and there they stand, verified, in chemical reincarnation, waving at their own old age, smiling their reassurance to the decades, a race of eternal pilgrims in a marketplace in the dusty sunlight, seven arms extended in a fabulous salute to the forgetfulness of being. What better proof (if proof is ever needed) that they have truly been alive? Their happiness, I think, was made of this, the anticipation of incontestable evidence, and had nothing to do with the present moment, which would pass with all the others into whatever is the opposite of eternity. I pretended to keep shooting, gathering their wasted light, letting their smiles enter the lens and wander the camera-body seeking the magic spool, the gelatin which captures the image, the film which threads through the waiting gate. Sullivan came out of the supermarket and I lowered the camera. I could not help feeling that what I was discovering here was power of a sort.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“The camera implies meaning where no meaning exists. I had not celebrated that brother and sister. I had mocked them. I had exploited their sorrow. I had tried to make them part of a hopeful message on the state of the Union. To be black is to be the actor. To be white is to be the critic.”
― don delillo, Américana

“She means everything literally. Don't kid yourself about that lady. She means everything literally.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“That's great. Tell me about it. I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography. The beginning of the end.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“You knew her for years and I knew her for minutes. It comes to the same thing. These matters have to be assessed in the light of eternity.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“How does a successful television commercial affect the viewer?"
"It makes him want to change the way he lives."
"In what way?" I said.
"It moves him from first person consciousness to third person. In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“When I get real high I can feel the space between sounds.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“In the afternoon I drank Coke and wrote poetry.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“Where do you live?"
"In the hearts of men," Sullivan said.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“This was the first of the St. Augustines. Previous memos had borne messages from Zwingli, Lévi-Strauss, Rilke, Chekhov, Tillich, William Blake, Charles Olson and a Kiowa chief named Satanta. Naturally the person responsible for these messages became known throughout the company as the Mad Memo-Writer. I never referred to him that way because it was much too obvious a name. I called him Trotsky. There was no special reason for choosing Trotsky; it just seemed to fit. I wondered if he was someone I knew. Everybody seemed to think he was probably a small grotesque man who had suffered many disappointments in life, who despised the vast impersonal structure of the network and who was employed in our forwarding department, the traditional repository for all sex offenders, mutants and vegetarians. They said he was most likely a foreigner who lived in a rooming house in Red Hook; he spent his nights reading an eight-volume treatise on abnormal psychology, in small type, and he told his grocer he had been a Talmudic scholar in the old country. This was the consensus and maybe it had a certain logic. But I found more satisfaction in believing that Trotsky was one of our top executives. He made eighty thousand dollars a year and stole paper clips from the office.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“I watched Buford set things up and I decided that tending bar might be a pretty good way to spend one's life. Spanking down big foaming steins of beer to be encircled by the huge skeet-shooting hands of virile novelists. Rattling the cocktail shaker and doing a little samba step for the amusement of the ladies. To be an expert at something.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“Meredith was not so secure in her maturity that she did not suffer those periods of despondency and doubt which seemed to weave through the lives of self-reliant women.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“Tyle w nich było chrześcijaństwa. I tak niewiele z Chrystusa.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“I wanted to free myself from that montage of speed, guns, torture, rape, orgy and consumer packaging which constitutes the vision of sex in America.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“At first it was only a nuisance. Now it's a nuisance that threatens to become a way of life.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“It takes centuries to invent the primitive.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana