Daily Inspiration Quote by Don DeLillo

DeLillo turns secrecy into a social instinct, less confession booth than support group. The sentence moves like a diagnosis: men with secrets are not “bound” or “connected” but “drawn,” as if gravity does the work and choice is an afterthought. Then he punctures the obvious assumption - that secrets exist to be told - and replaces it with something colder and more DeLillo: secrets are a condition you manage. You don’t seek understanding; you seek proximity to others who won’t ask for the story.

The line’s bite comes from its double refusal. These men don’t want to share what they know, and they don’t even want to be known. What they want is “company,” a word that normally implies warmth, recast here as a kind of camouflage. “Like-minded” suggests ideology or taste, but DeLillo twists it into complicity: a mental alignment built around what must stay unsaid. Then the kicker, “the fellow afflicted,” frames secrecy as illness, not power. It’s a subtle rebuke to the macho mythology of the lone keeper of dark knowledge. In DeLillo’s world, the secret doesn’t make you special; it makes you symptomatic.

Contextually, this tracks with his recurring obsession: networks of paranoia, clandestine institutions, men performing control while quietly undone by what they’re carrying. The subtext is that secrecy breeds its own communities - not to reveal truth, but to normalize the pressure of withholding it. Silence becomes a shared language, and that’s the real intimacy.