Underworld (2)

Don DeLillo
New York: Scribner
1997

Ideas and Quotes to Discuss:
"...sees the great open horseshoe of the grandstand and that unfolding vision of the grass that always seems to mean he has stepped outside his life...."

"...he hears the warmup pitches crack into the catcher's mitt; a series of reports that carry a comet's tail of secondary sound."

"...little waxy napkins they got with their hot dogs...."

"...circus-catching dimes on the wing and then sailing peanut bags into people's chests."

"This is the nature of Thompson's homer: it makes people want to be in the streets, joined with others, telling others what happened, those few who haven't heard--comparing faces and states of mind."

"This is the day he has never shaken off, the final Sunday before the first Monday of school."

"You used to have the same dimensions as the observable universe; now you're a lost speck."

"She intended to meet her own end with senses intact, grasp it, know it finally, open herself to the mystery that others mistake for something freakish and unspeakable."

"...the energy that hurrying people make, lunch crowds and buses and bike messengers, all that consciousness powering down the narrow gorge of Manhattan...."

"They rode home on the Third Avenue El, rattlebanging up Manhattan and through the Bronx, looking out the train windows into tenement apartments on both sides, hundreds of film-flicking lives shooting past their eyes forty feet above the street..."

"He'd served in Vietnam, after all, where everything he'd ever disbelieved or failed to imagine turned out, in the end, to be true."

"...a dead afternoon in a dark bar was not the worst of fates."

" 'Let's go eat,' or whatever people say when a thing begins to be over."

"The serenity of immense design is missing from her life."