Quotes from David Foster Wallace

Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned or nostril-explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress.

Some answer or trick of the will: the ability not to think about it. What if everyone knew this trick but Claude Sylvanshine?

The reality is that dying isn't bad, but it takes forever.

ast year's Best-Sex-Scene-in-a-film winner Vince Voyeur's real name turns out to be John LaForme. Rhetorical Q.: How, if one's real name was John LaForme, could that person possibly feel the need for a nom de guerre?

There's something elementally horrific about waking before dawn.

It may, after all, be alright to do something scary without thinking, but not when the scariness is the not thinking itself.

Hal finds himself riveted at something about the degenerating game that seems so terribly abstract and fraught with implications and consequences that even thinking about how to articulate it seems so complexly stressful that being almost incapacitated with absorption is almost the only way out of the complex stress.

One possible way of couching it is to choose to say that we will take apart your skull very gently and reconstruct a skull for you that will have a highly developed bump of clarity and a slight concave dent where the fear-instinct used to be.

since it's my own choices that'll lock me in, it seems unavoidable—if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.

The world divides into those who like the managed induction of terror and those who don't. I do not find terror exciting. I find it terrifying.

I pay for the privilege of handing over to trained professionals responsibility not just for my experience but for my interpretation of that experience—i.e. my pleasure. My pleasure is for 7 nights and 6.5 days wisely and efficiently managed… just as promised in the cruise line's advertising—nay, just as somehow already accomplished in the ads, with their 2nd-person imperatives, which make them not promises but predictions.

El sol, cuando los ojos parpadeantes alcanzan a verlo aunque sea de soslayo, los enceguece de azul y rojo como un foco. «¿Por qué no? ¿Por qué no? ¿Por qué no «no» entonces, si el mejor razonamiento que puedes hacer es por qué no?»

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.

the ideas of ravacious herds of feral domesticated housepets and oversized insects not only taking over the abandoned homes of relocated Americans but actually setting up house and keeping them in model repair and impressive equity

daily visual reminder of the depths drink sunk him to, so Mrs. O. had gone around with her nose bent over flat against her left cheek—Bud O.'d tagged her with a left cross—until U.H.I.D. referred her to Al-Anon, which

Booboo, we've been over this. I can't be asleep if we're talking.

L'odio che provi a fine giornata per tutto il lavoro è semplicemente parte del lavoro

When he settles in with the tray and cartridge, the TP's viewer's digital display reads 1927h.

How can you be so ugly to me?" "'Cause I'm bored, and when a man gets bored enough he gets like an animal. I'm an animal now, feels like.

your huge blocks of industrial ice packed in fragrant sawdust, the huge blocks of man-sized ice with flaws way inside like trapped white faces, white flames of internal cracks.

Le persone bruciate alla nascita, quelle colpite e offese oltre ogni giustizia, finiscono per ripiegarsi nel loro stesso fuoco, o per risorgere

I was one of the men in this room, the only one wearing a wristwatch who never once glanced at it. What looked just like glasses were not. I was wired from stem to stern.

We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness.

What's interesting to Hal Incandenza about his take on Struck, sometimes Pemulis, Evan Ingersoll, et al. is that congenital plagiarists put so much more work into camouflaging their plagiarism than it would take just to write up an assignment from conceptual scratch. It usually seems like plagiarists aren't lazy so much as kind of navigationally insecure. They have trouble navigating without a detailed map's assurance that somebody has been this way before them.