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Murray Jay Siskin
Jack’s fourteen-year-old son, and the oldest of the children living with the family. Heinrich is an eclectic know-it-all determined to confound his father by intelligently employing obscure knowledge that distorts simple logic. Armed with esoteric facts, rhetorical finesse, and strange fascinations, he is constantly ready and willing to refute common knowledge. His friends are severe: one, Tommy Roy Foster, is a prisoner convicted of murder with whom Heinrich plays chess by mail; another, Orest Mercator, is an older boy training to beat the Guinness World Record for the length of time spent in a cage with poisonous snakes. As evidenced by these friends with warped interests and pasts, Heinrich is drawn to calamity and is brought to life by disastrous events, ultimately coming into his own while lecturing a group of panicked evacuees about the airborne toxic event.
Heinrich Quotes in White Noise
The White Noise quotes below are all either spoken by Heinrich or refer to Heinrich. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 6
Quotes
Our senses? Our senses are wrong a lot more often than they’re right. This has been proved in the laboratory. Don’t you know about all those theorems that say nothing is what it seems?
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Chapter 10
Quotes
Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn’t it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? […] It’s all this activity in the brain and you don’t know what’s you as a person and what’s some neuron that just happens to fire or just happens to misfire. Isn’t that why Tommy Roy killed those people?
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Heinrich Quotes in White Noise
The White Noise quotes below are all either spoken by Heinrich or refer to Heinrich. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 6
Quotes
Our senses? Our senses are wrong a lot more often than they’re right. This has been proved in the laboratory. Don’t you know about all those theorems that say nothing is what it seems?
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10
Quotes
Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn’t it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? […] It’s all this activity in the brain and you don’t know what’s you as a person and what’s some neuron that just happens to fire or just happens to misfire. Isn’t that why Tommy Roy killed those people?
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
