Point Omega Quotes

“If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”
― Don DeLillo , Point Omega

“Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“We need time to lose interest in things.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamily self-aware, the submicroscopic moments. He said this more than once, Elster did, in more than one way. His life happened, he said, when he sat staring at a blank wall, thinking about dinner.

An eight-hundred page biography is nothing more than dead conjecture, he said. I almost believed him when he said such things. He said we do this all the time, all of us, we become ourselves beneath the running thoughts and dim images, wondering idly when we'll die. This is how we live and think whether we know it or not. These are the unsorted thoughts we have looking out the train window, small dull smears of meditative panic.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“...Because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond necessity.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“It's all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“She became confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn't working.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“We're a crowd, a swarm. We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough. The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“You understand it's not a matter of strategy. I'm not talking about secrets or deceptions. I'm talking about being yourself. If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“It's healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line. I assume you know that, he said.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“Jessie was trying to read science fiction but nothing she read so far could begin to match ordinary life on this planet, she said, for sheer unimaginableness.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“Before I fell asleep, eventually, was thinking when I was a small kid how I'd try to imagine the end of the century and what a far-off wonder that was and I'd figure out how old I'd be when the century ended, years, months, days and now look, incredible we're here - we're six years in and I realize I'm the same skinny kid, my life shadowed by his presence, won't step on cracks on the sidewalk, not as superstition but as a test, a discipline, still do it.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“There is no lie in war or preparation of war that can't be defended. ”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“She wasn't a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“We drove in silence behind a motorboat being towed by a black pickup. I thought of his remarks about matter and being, those long nights on the deck, half smashed, he and I, transcendence, paroxysm, the end of human consciousness. It seemed so much dead echo now. Point omega. A million years away. The omega point has narrowed, here and now, to the point of a knife as it enters a body. All the man's grand themes funneled down to local grief, one body, out there somewhere, or not.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“He had a good vocabulary except when he was talking to someone.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“Every lost moment is the life. It's unknowable, except to us, each of us inexpressibly...”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“I like old movies on television where a man lights a woman's cigarette. That's all they seemed to do in those old movies, the men and women. I'm normally so totally disregardless. But every time I see an old movie on television, I keep a sharp eye out for a man lighting a woman's cigarette.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“The desert was clairvoyant, this is what he'd always believed, that the landscape unravels and reveals, it knows future as well as past.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“Behind me, his bedroom light went out, brightening the sky, and how queer it seemed, half the heavens coming nearer, all those incandescent masses increasing in number, the stars and constellations, because somebody turns off a light in a house in the desert...”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“Early on, Elster cited one of the meanings of rendering — a coat of plaster applied to a masonry surface. From this he asked the reader to consider a walled enclosure in an unnamed country and a method of questioning, using what he called enhanced interrogation techniques, that was meant to induce a surrender (one of the meanings of rendition-a giving up or giving back) in the person being interrogated.

I didn't read the piece at the time, knew nothing about it. If I had known, before I knew Elster, what would I have thought? Word origins and covert prisons. Old French, Obsolete French and torture by proxy. The essay concentrated on the word itself, earliest known use, changes in form and meaning, zero-grade forms, reduplicated forms, suffixed forms. There were footnotes like nested snakes. But no specific mention of black sites, third-party states or international treaties and conventions.

He compared the evolution of a word to that of organic matter.

He pointed out that words were not necessary to one's experience of the true life.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“She was sylphlike, her element was air. She gave the impression that nothing about this place was different from any other, this south and west, latitude and longitude. She moved through places in a soft glide, feeling the same things everywhere, this is what there was, the space within.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega