the interagency working groups. He was the outsider,
a scholar with an approval rating but no experience
in government. He sat at a table in a secure conference
room with the strategic planners and military analysts.
He was there to conceptualize, his word, in quotes,
to apply overarching ideas and principles to such
matters as troop deployment and counterinsurgency."
-- DeLillo, Don (2010-02-02), Point Omega
These were things he seemed to absorb through his pores.
There were the distances that enfolded every feature of
the landscape and there was the force of geologic time,
out there somewhere, the string grids of excavators
searching for weathered bone....
Richard Elster was seventy-three, I was less than half
his age. He’d invited me to join him here, old house,
under-furnished, somewhere south of nowhere in the
Sonoran Desert or maybe it was the Mojave Desert
or another desert altogether. Not a long visit, he’d said.
Today was day ten."
-- DeLillo, Don (2010-02-02), Point Omega
"Human perception is a saga of created reality.
But we were devising entities beyond the
agreed-upon limits of recognition or interpretation."
-- DeLillo, Don (2010-02-02), Point
Omega