Don DeLillo Quotes

When he was dry, he believed it was alcohol he needed, but when he had a few drinks in him, he knew it was something else, possibly a woman; and when he had it all -- cash, booze, and a wife -- he couldn't be distracted from the great emptiness that was always falling through him and never hit the ground.

When you can no longer feel the life that you are, you are likely to try to fill up your life with things.

It was strange to have no self-to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do.

For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can.

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

I was working in cartoons. I could go to Comic-Con, buy the Hal Jordan ring, I could buy animation cels, but at the end of the day, I come back to an empty apartment. I had a life that was only around me, and when I was broken, my world was broken.

He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led to nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.

Countries like ours are full of people who have all of the material comforts they desire, yet lead lives of quiet (and at times noisy) desperation, understanding nothing but the fact that there is a hole inside them and that however much food and drink they pour into it, however many motorcars and television sets they stuff it with, however many well-balanced children and loyal friends they parade around the edges of it. . . it aches!

Why does the feeling of emptiness occupy so much space?

They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.

There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.

For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody.

We’re always alone. You can be in a crowded room and still feel the bite of loneliness. Personally, I find that it bites deepest whenever others are around.

One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.

There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.

The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

The one thing I’d learned was that having someone with you all the time did not take away the loneliness. You could be surrounded by people and be lonely. Something was missing. I could almost pinpoint it, but right when it was within my grasp I forgot; it just slipped away.

Then when dusk began to settle he would retrace his steps, back to his own world. And on the way home, a loneliness would always claim his heart. He could never quite get a grip on what it was. It just seemed that whatever lay waiting "out there" was all too vast, too overwhelming for him to possibly ever make a dent in.

And now you've lost the only thing that ever made you feel alive.

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss? Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

Sunday neurosis, that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest.

The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn´t really anyone, and I wasn´t really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a dead man´s book.

There is no wilderness. There is only our inability to fill the emptiness in which we live.