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"Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?'What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing."
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Exlpore more Impermanence quotes
"Even as I hold youI think of you as someone gonefar, far away. Your eyes the colorof pennies in a bowl of dark honeybringing sweet light to someone elseyour black hair slipping through my fingersis the flash of your head goingaround a corneryour smile, breaking before me,the flippant last turnof a revolving door,emptying you out, changed,away from me.Even as I hold youI am letting go."
"If there were a sympathy in choice,War, death, or sickness, did lay siege to it,Making it momentary as a sound,Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,Brief as the lightning in the collied nightThat, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!'The jaws of darkness do devour it up;So quick bright things come to confusion."
"Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart."
"It is the nature of the circumstances to disperse. If there is attachment with the circumstance, there will be abhorrence when they get dispersed."
"We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate. From images that are full, the spirit plunges on to others that suddenly must be filled; there are no lakes till eternity. Here, falling is best. To fall from the mastered emotion into the guessed-at, and onward."
"Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,just once. And never again. But to have beenthis once, completely, even if only once:to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing."
"Time is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike at and who steals what is most precious to men."
"Those who are made can be unmade."
"Technically, all tattoos are temporary, even permanent ones."
"Money can buy you everything to fill your time but it cannot buy time itself. And things are definitely not time."
Explore more quotes by Don DeLillo
"No sense of the irony of human experience, 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."
"A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true."
"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."
"Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach?Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you."
"If you could stretch a given minute, what would you find between its unstuck components? Probably some kind of astral madness. A bleak comprehension of the final size of things."
"When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying."
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