I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.
— David Foster Wallace
Devotion Infinite Jest quotations
I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.
Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
The really important kind of freedom involves...being able truly to care about other people...
In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
....there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an "end" can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you.
It takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.
Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?" "I give." "You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.
Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.
You know, I don't want to be offensive.
But 'Infinite Jest' [regarded by many as Wallace's masterpiece] is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can't think, he can't write. There's no discernible talent.
Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.
You can be shaped, or you can be broken.
There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. ... How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.
...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.
It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.
Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?
What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.
There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
Try to let what is unfair teach you.
No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.
Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. Where be your jibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?
The fund of sensible discourse is limited; that of jest and badinerie is infinite.
My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.
What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?
Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.
Why not? Why not?Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?