"A Still Picture of an Awful Moment"

Don DeLillo is a quote-producing machine. I doubt he can string together a paragraph that doesn't have at least one revelatory sentence in it, a trail of words that hits you with a nasty right hook and follows up with a sucker punch right in the stomach, leaving you nodding "Yes". He writes about an America and a world that is right before our very eyes but too often is pushed under the rug and, furthermore, is then stomped flat into oblivion. By that I mean he might be one of the few writers today who actually captures the American culture for what it is.  

Libra is the assassination of JFK and the development of Lee Oswald meets DeLillo's fierce imagination. I've nothing but good things to say. Historical fiction usually winds up lackluster and underwhelming for me. Not in this case. DeLillo's fictional portrayal of this seminal event in American history embodies what I wish all historical fiction would do. Quotes emerge throughout this book like land mines, so I'll try to pick a few that stand out the most, but that could prove to be a task too difficult for me to handle. Also that would create quite a long post. 

"'Some things we wait for all our lives without knowing it. Then it happens and at once we recognize who we are and how we are meant to proceed.'"

"Some people don't believe in God but they color eggs at easter just to change the pattern of their days."

"'I would say a hardworking, sincere, honest fellow has found himself in a position where he is being crushed by the pressure exerted from opposite directions. That makes him typical, I guess.'"

"She believed these were personal forms of expression. She believed no message she could send a friend was more intimate and telling than a story in the paper about a violent act, a crazed man, a bombed Negro home, a Buddhist monk who sets himself on fire. Because these are the things that tell us how we live."

"We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and the 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."

"Never love me for my weaknesses, he wanted to say. Never take the blame for me. Never think it is your fault when I am the one. I am always the one."

"A family expects you to be one thing when you're another. They twist you out of shape. You have a brother with a good job and a nice wife and nice kids and they want you be a person they will recognize. And a mother in a white uniform who grips your arms and weeps. You are trapped in their minds. They shape and hammer you. Going away is what you do to see yourself plain."

"'I am always the funny one, the strange one, the tiny one. I want you to assume one of these thankless roles.'"