White Noise Quotes

“we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“حينما تسوء الأمور، يشعر الناس بأنهم مرغمون على الإفراط في الأكل”
― دون ديليلو, White Noise

“Tuition at the College-on-the-Hill is fourteen thousand dollars, Sunday brunch included.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American. Your brain has a trillion neurons and every neuron has ten thousand little dendrites. The system of inter-communication is awe-inspiring. It's like a galaxy that you can hold in your hand, only more complex, more mysterious."
"Why does this make you proud to be an American?"
"The infant's brain develops in response to stimuli. We still lead the world in stimuli.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“بدا وكأن الذنب كان ترفًا لا تسمع لنفسها بامتلاكه إلا حين يكون الخطر في أدناه”
― دون ديليلو, White Noise

“The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your causal gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves of identity and being. There are no amateurs in the world of children”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Steffie took my hand and we walked past the fruit bins, an area that extended about forty-five yards along one wall. The bins were arranged diagonally and backed my mirrors that people accidentally punched when reaching for fruit in upper rows.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom."

Cotsakis crushed a can of Diet Pepsi and threw it at a garbage pail.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“De eso se trata con la tecnología: por una parte, consigue despertar nuestro apetito por la inmortalidad; por otra, amenaza con extinción universal. La tecnología es la naturaleza desprovista de lujuria.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. They walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go, clusters of well-dressed figures frozen in the aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic, trying to remember where they’d seen the Cream of Wheat.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“a life terrain, might itself be the object of a person’s study and wonder for years. A cosmology against the void.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“How could there be a north below a south? Is this what I found confusing?”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“She was transcribing names and phone numbers from an old book to a new one. There were no addresses. Her friends had phone numbers only, a race of people with a seven-bit analog consciousness.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“We create beautiful and lasting things, build vast civilizations.” “Gorgeous evasions,” he said. “Great escapes.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“What is a nucleotide ? You don’t know, do you? Yet these are the building blocks of life. What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Cotsakis was a monolith of thick and wadded flesh. He’d been Little Richard’s personal bodyguard and had led security details at rock concerts before joining the faculty here.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“It must be deeply satisfying for you. The college is internationally known as a result of Hitler studies. It has an identity, a sense of achievement. You’ve evolved an entire system around this figure, a structure with countless substructures and interrelated fields of study, a history within history. I marvel at the effort. It was masterful, shrewd and stunningly preemptive. It’s what I want to do with Elvis.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“At dinner Denise kept getting up and walking in small stiff rapid strides to the toilet off the hall, a hand clapped to her mouth. We paused in odd moments of chewing or salt-sprinkling to hear her retch incompletely. Heinrich told her she was showing outdated symptoms”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“The look was one of solemn compassion. It was a look I did not necessarily trust, believing it had little to do with pity or love or sadness. I recognized it in fact as something else completely. The adolescent female’s tenderest form of condescension.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn’t it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don’t want to go to Montana. How do I know I really want to go and it isn’t just some neurons firing or something? Maybe it’s just an accidental flash in the medulla and suddenly there I am in Montana and I find out I really didn’t want to go there in the first place. I can’t control what happens in my brain, so how can I be sure what I want to do ten seconds from now, much less Montana next summer? It’s all this activity in the brain and you don’t know what’s you as a person and what’s some neuron that just happens to fire or just happens to misfire.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“I’d been pushed away from the narrator by people crowding in to listen, well over a hundred of them, dragging their shoulder bags and garment bags across the dusty floor. Just as I realized I was almost out of hearing range, I saw Bee standing next to me, her small face smooth and white in a mass of kinky hair. She jumped up into my embrace, smelling of jet exhaust. “Where’s the media?” she said. “There is no media in Iron City.” “They went through all that for nothing?”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“BEE MADE US FEEL self-conscious at times, a punishment that visitors will unintentionally inflict on their complacent hosts. Her presence seemed to radiate a surgical light. We began to see ourselves as a group that acted without design, avoided making decisions, took turns being stupid and emotionally unstable, left wet towels everywhere, mislaid our youngest member. Whatever we did was suddenly a thing that seemed to need explaining. My wife was especially disconcerted. If Denise was a pint-sized commissar, nagging us to higher conscience, then Bee was a silent witness, calling the very meaning of our lives into question. I watched Babette stare into her cupped hands, aghast. That chirping sound was just the radiator.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your casual gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves of identity and being. There are no amateurs in the world of children.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it’s the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People in low-lying areas get the floods, people in shanties get the hurricanes and tornados. I’m a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a neat and pleasant town near a college with a quaint name. These things don’t happen in places like Blacksmith.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“It affects the false part of the human memory or whatever. That’s not all. They’re not calling it the black billowing cloud anymore.” “What are they calling it?” He looked at me carefully. “The airborne toxic event.” He spoke these words in a clipped and foreboding manner, syllable by syllable, as if he sensed the threat in state-created terminology. He continued to watch me carefully, searching my face for some reassurance against the possibility of real danger—a reassurance he would immediately reject as phony. A favorite ploy of his. “These things are not important. The important thing is location. It’s there, we’re here.” “A large air mass is moving down from Canada,” he said evenly. “I already knew that.” “That doesn’t mean it’s not important.” “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Depends.” “The weather’s about to change,” he practically cried out to me in a voice charged with the plaintive throb of his special time of life. “I’m not just a college professor. I’m the head of a department. I don’t see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That’s for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“No weakening of the spirit. No sense of the irony of human existence, that we are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise