Falling Man

Falling Man by Don Delillo

“’What I’m saying is simple. This is for them,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’ ‘It’s theirs,’ he said. ‘Don’t make it yours.’

“The world changes first in the mind of the man who wants to change it."

‘What we carry. This is the story in the end,’ she said remotely.

“This was the man who would not submit to her need for probing intimacy, overintimacy, the urge to ask, examine, delve, draw things out, trade secrets, tell everything. It was a need that had the body in it, hands, feet, genitals, scummy odors, clotted dirt, even if it was all talk or sleepy murmur. She wanted to absorb everything, childlike, the dust of stray sensation, whatever she could breathe in from other people’s pores. She used to think she was other people. Other people have truer lives.”

“’Who is that man? You think you see yourself in the mirror. But that’s not you. That’s not what you look like. That’s not the literal face, if there is such a thing, ever. That’s the composite face. That’s the face in transition.’”

“’Some people are lucky. They become who they are supposed to be,’ he said. ‘This did not happen to me until I met your mother. One day we started to talk and it never stopped, this conversation.’”

“Fortune favors the brave. He didn’t know the Latin original of the old adage and this was a shame. This is what he’d always lacked, that edge of unexpected learning.”