White Noise

Not so much the post-apocalyptic narrative the book jacket leads one to believe, Don Delillo's White Noise is an acclaimed (hence the National Book Awared) postmodernist novel, a commentary on ubiquitous media (hence the title), family life, and mortality.

"Their summer has been bloated with criminal pleasures, as always."

"She said I made virtue of her flaws because it was my nature to shelter loved ones from the truth. Something lurked inside the truth, she said."

"Decorative gestures add romance to a life."

"'I want to be free of cities and sexual entanglements."

"Sometimes I think our love is inexperienced."

"If I could become more ugly, he seems to be suggesting, it would help my career enormously."

"'Our senses? Our sense are wrong a lot more often than they're right. This has been proved in the laboratory. Don't you know about all those theorems that say nothing is what it seems? There's no past, present or future outside of our own mind. The so-called laws of motion are a big hoax. Even sound can trick the mind. Just because you don't hear a sound doesn't mean it's not out there. Dogs can hear it. Other animals. And I'm sure there are sounds even dogs can't hear. But they exist in the air, in waves. Maybe they never stop. High, high, high-pitched. Coming from somewhere.'"

"'What good is my truth? My truth means nothing.'"

"'All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers' plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children's games. We edge nearer to death every time we plot.'"

"But when I say I believe in complete disclosure I don't mean it cheaply, as anecdotal sport or shallow revelation. It is a form of self-renewal and a gesture of custodial trust. Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another's care and protection."

"What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation."

"'Here we don't die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think.'"

"'In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere. Men shout as they die, to be noticed, remembered for a second or two.'"

"'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.'"

"It was the time of the year, the time of the day, for small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the air."

"We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in a mass of advancing lava. Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping."

"He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it."

"'We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information.'"

"'For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set.'"

"Murray says 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."

"It isn't that she doesn't cherish life; it's being left alone that frightens her. The emptiness, the sense of cosmic darkness."

"'Whatever relaxes you is dangerous. If you don't know that, I might as well be talking to the wall."

"'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.'"

"This death would penetrate, seep into the genes, show itself in bodies not yet born."

"What people in exodus fear most immediately is that those in positions of authority will long since have feld, leaving us in charge of our own chaos."

"Is it possible to have a false perception of an illusion?"

"I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own disasters."

"I did not feel Armageddon in my bones, but I worried about all those people who did, who were ready for it, wishing hard, making phone calls and bank withdrawals. If enough people want it to happen, will it happen? How many people are enough people? Why are we talking to each other from this aboriginal crouch?"

"'Your genetics, your personals, your medicals, your psychologicals, your police-and-hospitals. It comes back pulsing stars. This doesn't mean anything is going to happen to you as such, at least not today or tomorrow. It just means you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that.'"

"You are said to be dying and yet are separate from the dying, can ponder it at your leisure, literally see on the X-ray photograph or computer screen the horrible alien logic of it all. It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself. A network of symbols has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods. It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying."

"'What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grow every second of the day. But nobody actually knows anything.'"

"Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent."

"'There's a theory about deja vu.'
'I don't want to hear it.'
'Why do we think these things happened before? Simple. They did happen before, in our minds, as visions of the future. Because these are precognitions, we can't fit the material into our system of consciousness as it is now structured. This is basically surpernatural stuff. We're seeing into the future but haven't learned how to process the experience. So it stays hidden until the precognition comes true, until we come face to face with the event. Now we are free to remember it, to experience it as familiar material.'
'Why are so many people having these episodes now?'
'Because death is in the air,' he said gently. 'It is liberating suppressed material. It is getting us closer to things we haven't learned about ourselves. Most of us have probably seen our own death but haven't known how to make the material surface. Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is, 'I know this feeling. I was here before.'"

"All the amazement that's left in the world is microscopic."

"'The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.'"

"'He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.'"

"'I have no body. I'm only a mind or a self, alone in a vast space.'"

"'How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise.'"

"'Self-pity is something I've worked very hard to maintain. Why abandon it just because you grow up? Self pity is something that children are very good at, which must mean it is natural and important.'"

"'We've looked at hundred of crash sequences. Cars with cars. Cars with trucks. Trucks with buses. Motorcycles with cars. Cars with helicopters. Truchs with trucks. My students think these movies are prophetic. They mark the suicide wish of technology. The drive to suicide, the hurtling rush to suicide.'"

"In the dark the mind runs on like a devouring machine, the only thing awake in the universe."

"'You're a man, Jack. We all know about men and their insane rage. This is something men are very good at. Insane and violent jealousy. Homicidal rage.'"

"'Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.'"

"'Think of them as words. We have to use words. We can't just grunt.'"

"'I have a friend who says that's why people take vacations. Not to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.'"

"There was a silence. I waited for her to ask me if this desperation was inevitable, if she would one day experience the same fear, undergo the same ordeal."

"'Be smart for once in your life,' he told me in the dark car. 'It's not what you want that matters.'"

"'So is the insomnia. The insomnia's all right. What do I gain by sleeping? You reach an age when every minute of sleep is one less minute to do useful things.'"

"'Forget the mind completely. The mind goes before the body. That's the way it's supposed to be. So don't worry about the mind. The mind is all right.'"

"Murray says it's possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there."

"'There are more people dead today than in the rest of world history put together. What's one extra?'"

"How literary, I thought peevishly. Streets thick with the details of impulsive life as the hero ponders the latest phase in his dying."

"'Technology is lust removed from nature.'"

"'The killer, in theory, attempt to defeat his own death by killing others.'"

"'Because friends have to be brutally honest with each other. I'd feel terrible if I didn't tell you what I was thinking, especially at a time like this.'"

"His fear was beautiful."

"'Do you want to know what I believe or what I pretend to believe?'"