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"The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it."
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Exlpore more Modernity quotes
"To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the ground is shaky: so where can you set the foundations? An answer to this question must be found if one is to produce anything vital and hence lasting. All this disturbs me so much that I no longer like to be spoken to about it."
"These days we have Smartphones, Smartcars, Smartboards, Smarteverything, but consider this: if technology is getting smarter, does that mean humans are getting dumber?"
"The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements."
"Everything is much easier in the half-blind and half-deaf world of modern giants that seduce processions of the blind into the world of great emptiness. In their sky the stars shine and their names live in the parallel and independently of their work."
"And here is the shocking plot twist: as farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn't really want to eat 700 more calories a day."
"It struck him that the true characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness."
"You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren't dying. They're merging into big conglomerates."
"Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls."
"These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus. They were so necessary, and not only to me. Without them we would still be living in mud huts, waiting to invent the wheel."
Explore more quotes by Don DeLillo
"The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?"
"When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery."
"Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail."
"The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence."
"I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence."
"One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language."
"I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts."
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