Libra Quotes

“Facts are lonely things”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“That which we fear to touch is often the very fabric of our salvation. ”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It is the sum total of the things they aren't telling us.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“A fact is innocent until someone wants it; then it become intelligence.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“The truth of the world is exhausting.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“There is a world inside the world.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“Maybe what has to happen is that the individual must allow himself to be swept along, must find himself in the stream of no-choice, the single direction. This is what makes things inevitable. You use the restrictions and penalties they invent to make yourself stronger. History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“Think of two parallel lines. […] One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“Something about the time of year depressed him deeply. Overcast skies and cutting wind, leaves falling, dusk falling, dark too soon, night flying down before you are ready. It's a terror. It's a bareness of the soul. He hears the rustle of nuns. Here comes winter in the bone. We've set it loose on the land. There must be some song or poem, some folk magic we can use to ease this fear. Skelly Bone Pete. Here it is in the landscape and sky. We've set it loose. We've opened up the ground and here it is. He took Interstate 45 south. He didn't want them to kill Leon. He felt a saturating sense of death, a dread in the soft filling of his bones, the suckable part, approaching Galveston now.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“That clean but lonely feeling when there are no other cars. The traffic lights changing just for you.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the .45 to even things up.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“Secrets are an exalted state, almost a dream state. They're a way of arresting motion, stopping the world so we can see ourselves in it.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“Some people don't believe in God but they color eggs at Easter just to change the pattern of their days.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“[Lee Oswald] saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history, he and his mother, locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law. The books made him part of something. Something led up to his presence in this room, in this particular skin, and something would follow. Men in small rooms. Men reading and waiting, struggling with secret and feverish ideas.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“Everything is supposed to be something. But it never is. That's the nature of existence.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“I’ll tell you what it means, these orbiting sensors that can hear us in our beds. It means the end of loyalty. The more complex the systems, the less conviction in people. Conviction will be drained out of us. Devices will drain us, make us vague and pliant.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“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.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“Always the pain, the chaos of composition. He could not find order in the field of little symbols. They were in the hazy distance. He could not clearly see the picture that is called a word. A word is also a picture of a word. He saw spaces, incomplete features, and tried to guess at the rest.
He made wild tries at phonetic spelling. But the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make them right. The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“A word is also a picture of a word.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“There is enough mystery in the facts as we know them, enough of conspiracy, coincidence, loose ends, dead ends, multiple interpretations. There is no need […] to invent the grand and masterful scheme, the plot that reaches flawlessly in a dozen directions.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“Devices make us pliant. We want to please them. The machine was his only hope of deliverance after what he'd done, what he'd loosed into the crowd. A way out of death.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“When Lee has a certain look on his face, eyes kind of amused, mouth small and tight, he finds himself thinking of his father. He believes it is a look his father may have used. It feels like his father. A curious sensation, the look coming upon him, taking hold in an unmistakable way, and then his old man is here, eerie and forceful and whole, a meeting across worlds.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“Even as he printed the words, he imagined people reading them, people moved by his loneliness and disappointment, even by his wretched spelling, the childish mesh of his composition. Let them see the struggle and humiliation, the effort he had to exert to write a simple sentence. The pages were crowded, smudged, urgent, a true picture of his state of mind, of his rage and frustration, knowing a thing but not being able to record it properly.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra