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"A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it."
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"I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness that I'd practically invented."
"I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."
"That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you - - is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable."
"While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace."
"And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it."
"An excellent man he has no enemies and none of his friends like him."
"I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company."
"In these pages, traveling "solo does not necessarily mean "alone. The absence of other people often suggests regretful isolation. "Solo by contrast, is a willful decision to be the architect of our own experience."
"I had gotten so used to being alone, but never entirely used to it. Never used to it enough to stop wanting the alternative."
Explore more quotes by Don DeLillo
"Memory is the faculty of absolution. Men developed memories to ease their disquiet over things they did as men. The deep past is the only innocence and therefore necessary to retain."
"It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything. It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate picture. Then he is upside down. Then he is right side up. You shoot at a series of images conveyed to you through a metal tube. The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you've killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it's ordinary murder."
"Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?"
"Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted."
"The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings."
"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?"
"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."
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