Quotes and Comments from WHITE NOISE


On death at a high income level:

"'I have trouble imagining death at that income level,' she said.

'Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands.'"

Murray on the difference between a small town setting and the big city:

"'A small town setting. I want to be free of cities and sexual entanglements. Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of the air, traffic, and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings. The heat that floats out of the subways and the tunnels. It's always fifteen degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers. The entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat. The eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city. Heat and wetness.'"

Jack on the purpose of shopping:

"It seemed to me that Babette and I, in the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar package designs and vivid lettering, the giant sizes, the family bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls - it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening."

Murray on the most important group identity:

"'Once you're out of school, it is only a matter of time before you experience the vast loneliness and dissatisfaction of consumers who have lost their group identity.'"

Jack on his fascination with Hitler:

"'A valid point. But it's not a question of greatness. It's not a question of good and evil. I don't know what it is. Look at it this way. Some people always wear a favorite color. Some people carry a gun. Some people put on a uniform and feel bigger, stronger, safer. It's in this area that my obsessions dwell.'"

Jack on the source of misinformation:

"The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation"

On human existence:

"Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts."

Alfonse on why California deserves the disasters it gets:

"'The flow is constant,' Alfonse said. 'Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts, we feel California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.'"

Jack on the spiritual side of shopping:

"'The encounter put me in the mood to shop. ...and we walked across two parking lots to the main structure in Mid-Village Mall... We moved from store to store, rejecting not only items in certain departments, not only entire departments but whole stores, mammoth corporations that did not strike our fancy for one reason or another. ... I shopped with reckless abandon. I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it. ... I began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I'd forgotten existed. ... I traded money for goods. The more money I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums. These sums poured off my skin like so much rain. These sums in fact came back to me in the form of existential credit.'"

Jack on the nature of human existence in modern times:

"Were we a fragile unit surrounded by hostile facts?"

Jack on the effect of class on disasters:

"'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.'"

Jack on deja vu:

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

Jack on another fixation with the myth of German superiority:

"'It's German,' I told her. 'Eat it.'"

Jack on the human mind

"The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways."

Heinrich on knowledge:

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

Murray on modern death:

"'This is the nature of modern death," Murray said. "It has a life independent of us. It is growing in prestige and dimension. ... We study it objectively. ...The more we learn, the more it grows. Is this some law of physics? Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent. Is it a law of nature? Or some private superstition of mine?'"

Jack on modern society:

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

Babette on authority figures:

"'Knowledge changes every day. People like to have their beliefs reinforced.... The world is more complicated for adults than it is for children. We didn't grow up with all these shifting facts and attitudes. One day they just started appearing. So people need to be reassured b someone in a position of authority that a certain way to do something is the right way or the wrong way, at least for the time being. I'm the closest they could find, that's all.'"

Jack on eating:

"It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain."

Murray on technology:

"This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature."