Zero K Quotes

“Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“Those blanked-out eternities at the airport. Getting there, waiting there, standing shoeless in long lines. Think about it. We take off our shoes and remove our metal objects and then enter a stall and raise our arms and get body-scanned and sprayed with radiation and reduced to nakedness on a screen somewhere and then how totally helpless we are all over again as we wait on the tarmac, belted in, our plane eighteenth in line, and it’s all ordinary, it’s routine, we make ourselves forget it. That’s the thing.”
She said, “What thing?”
“What thing. Everything. It’s the things we forget about that tell us who we are.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“The self. What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others?”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“Sometimes it takes an entire morning to outlive a dream, to outwake a dream.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“I feel artificially myself. I'm someone who's supposed to be me.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“Is it very different at home, or on the street, or waiting at the gate to board a flight? I maintain myself on the puppet drug of personal technology. Every touch of a button brings the neural rush of finding something I never knew and never needed to know until it appears at my anxious fingertips, where it remains for a shaky second before disappearing forever.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“Haven't you felt it? The loss of autonomy. The sense of being virtualized. The devices you use, the ones you carry everywhere, room to room, minute to minute, inescapably. Do you ever feel unfleshed?

All the coded impulses you depend on to guide you. All the sensors in the room are watching you, listening to you, tracking your habits, measuring your capabilities. All the linked data designed to incorporate you into the megadata. Is there something that makes you uneasy? Do you think about the technovirus, all systems down, global implosion? Or is it more personal? Do you feel steeped in some horrific digital panic that's everywhere and nowhere?”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“Isn’t death a blessing? Doesn’t it define the value of our lives, minute to minute, year to year?”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“Ordinary moments make the life. This is what she knew to be trustworthy and this is what I learned, eventually, from those years we spent together. No leaps or falls. I inhale the little drizzly details of the past and know who I am. What I failed to know before is clearer now, filtered up through time, an experience belonging to no one else, not remotely, no one, anyone, ever. I watch her use the roller to remove lint from her cloth coat. Define coat, I tell myself. Define time, define space.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“It's the things we forget about that tell us who we are.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“What’s the point of living if we don’t die at the end of it?”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“I'd never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be "only human," subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of sadness and loss that made me understand that I was a man expanded by grief.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“It is only me, the body in the shower, one person enclosed in plastic watching a drop of water skate down the wet curtain. The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It is a moment never to be thought of except when it is in the process of unfolding.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“I thought of women in other places, streets and boulevards in major cities, wind blowing, a woman’s skirt lifting in the breeze, the way the wind tenses the skirt, giving shape to the legs, making the skirt dip between the legs, revealing knees and thighs. Were these my father’s thoughts or mine?”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“I understood that he did not see the person he was talking to. He had the drifter's inclination to be impervious to names and faces. These were interchangeable components room to room, country to country. He did not talk so much as narrate. He traced a wavy line, his, and there was usually someone willing to be the random body that he told his stories to.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“Rocks are, but they do not exist.’ "
After a pause I said, “I came across this statement when I was in college and forgot it until very recently. ‘Man alone exists. Rocks are, but they do not exist. Trees are, but they do not exist. Horses are, but they do not exist.’ ”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“This is what long journeys are for. To see what’s back behind you, lengthen the view, find the patterns, know the people, consider the significance of one matter or another and then curse yourself or bless yourself or tell yourself, in my father’s situation, that you’ll have a chance to do it all over again, with variations.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“People getting older become more fond of objects. I think this is true. Particular things. A leather-bound book, a piece of furniture, a photograph, a painting, the frame that holds the painting. These things make the past seem permanent. A baseball signed by a famous player, long dead. A simple coffee mug. Things we trust. They tell an important story. A person’s life, all those who entered and left, there’s a depth, a richness.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It's a moment never to be thought of except when it's in the process of unfolding. Maybe this is why it doesn't seem peculiar. It is only me. I don't think about it. I simply live within it and then leave it behind.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“...Take the leap, they said. Live the billionaire's myth of immortality. And why not now, I thought. What else was there for Ross to acquire? Give the futurists their blood money and they will make it possible for you to live forever.
The pod would be his final shrine of entitlement.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“Shoes are like people. They adjust to situations.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others?”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“He told me that I hadn't done anything yet. Hadn't lived yet. All you do is pass the time, he said.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“How do we stand with others when the things that separate us are imposed at birth, when the separation haunts us and follows us day and night?”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“What's the point in living if we don't die at the end of it?”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“Technology has become a force of nature. We can’t control it. It comes blowing over the planet and there’s nowhere for us to hide.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“The book was a challenge, a secondhand paperback crammed with huge and violent emotions in small crowded type on waterlogged pages.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“The long soft life is what I feel I’m settling into and the only question is how deadly it will turn out to be. But”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K