The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
Don DelilloRead
When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the inevitability of death and how we are often reminded of our mortality by the ages of others.
Don Delillo's quote explores the connection between age and mortality, emphasizing how we subconsciously measure our own lives against the lives of others. As we read obituaries, the ages of the deceased prompt a chilling reflection on our own lifespan, making us confront the reality of our mortality through the lens of numbers. This contemplation reveals the profound way in which statistics can shape our perceptions of life and death.
In practice
This quote can be used in a eulogy to reflect on the way we perceive lifespans.
The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.
American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.
For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.
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This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.
That was Thorin's style. He was an important dwarf. If he had been allowed, he would probably have gone on like this until he was out of breath, without telling anyone there anything that was not known already. But he was rudely interrupted.
We talk about heaven being so far away. It is within speaking distance to those who belong there. Heaven is a prepared place for a prepared people.
It is a well-known fact that we see the faults in other's works more readily than we do in our own.
The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.
Down to Gehenna, or up to the Throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone.
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