Quotes from David Foster Wallace

Perhaps what most of us perceive as the centers of ourselves are simply no longer needed. And we both know that the absence of function, in nature, means death. There is nothing superfluous in nature.

Let the call go forth, to pretty much any nation we might feel like calling, that the past has been torched by a new and millennial generation of Americans

even the worst latex slip-and-slide off the steeply curved cerebrum's edge would mean a fall of only a few meters to the broad butylene platform, from which a venous-blue emergency ladder can be detached and lowered to extend down past the superior temporal gyrus and Pons and abducent to hook up with the polyurethane basilar-stem artery and allow a safe shimmy down to the good old oblongata just outside the rubberized meatus at ground zero.

In short that 99% of the head's thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself.

So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.

It's not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage." 32 This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical

It's unvarying and kind of spirit-killing for a Staffer to watch, that the only way your addict ever learns anything is the hard way. It has to happen to them to like upset the idolatry.

conspicuously perched in the eye of a bad party's somewhat forced-feeling storm of wit and good cheer

That God—unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both—speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God. That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there's a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it's interested in re you.

Una vez que me han visto, no pueden pensar en otra cosa ni quieren ver a nadie más y dejan de atender a sus responsabilidades cotidianas y creen que si me pueden tener a su lado todo el tiempo todo estará bien. Todo. Soy la solución a su profunda y esclavizadora necesidad de bailar mejilla con mejilla con la perfección.

The Union itself, the late A.Y. ('V.F.') Rickey's summum opus, is a great hollow brain-frame, an endowed memorial to the North American seat of Very High Tech, and is not as ghastly as out-of-towners suppose it must be, though the vitreally inflated balloon-eyes, deorbited and hung by twined blue cords from the

He and Hal exchanged the very slight sorts of nods people use when they like each other past all need for politeness.

Recuérdame que tome nota en el registro de lo positivo que sería verte salir de ese caparazón.

And then but so what's the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end?

He was around where the tree-line bulged herniatically out toward the end of the West Courts' fencing.

numinous aura)—which balcony means that even the worst latex slip-and-slide off the steeply curved cerebrum's edge would mean a fall of only a few meters to the broad butylene platform, from which a venous-blue emergency ladder can be detached and lowered to extend down past the superior temporal gyrus and Pons and abducent to hook up with the polyurethane basilar-stem artery and allow a safe shimmy down to the good old oblongata just outside the rubberized meatus at ground zero.

Re which, again, please keep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world, with its own shadowlands and crevasses-places where statements that seem to obey all the language's rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with.

Homo Duplex. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Narrator P.A. Heaven; Super-8 mm.; 70 minutes; black and white; sound. Parody of Woititz and Shulgin's 'post structural antidocumentaries,' interviews with fourteen Americans who are named John Wayne but are not the legendary 20th-century film actor John Wayne. MAGNETIC VIDEO (LIMITED RELEASE)

great big huge titties

And girl-women, women, curved like instruments or fruit, skin burnished brown-bright, suit tops held by delicate knots of fragile colored string against the pull of mysterious weights, suit bottoms riding low over the gentle juts of hips totally unlike your own, immoderate swells and swivels that melt in light into a surrounding space that cups and accommodates the soft curves as things precious. You almost understand.

Jakob Hlasek is six foot two and built like a halfback, his blond hair in a short square Eastern European cut, with icy eyes and cheekbones out to here: He looks like either a Nazi male model or a lifeguard in hell and seems in general just way too scary ever to try to talk to. His backhand is a one-hander, rather like Ivan Lendl's, and watching him practice it is like watching a great artist casually sketch something. I keep having to remember to blink.

And here's a cliché' that's earned its status as a cliché': whether you're free or locked up depends, all and only, on what you want. What you have matters about as much as the color of your sky. Or your bars.

Hal wills himself to stay objective and not form any judgments before he has serious data, hoping desperately for some sort of hopeful feeling to emerge.

Te quiero, Lenore. No hay odio en lo que siento por ti. Únicamente la tristeza intensa que me provoca mi incapacidad para explicarlo o describirlo