Quotes from David Foster Wallace

He knew what the Beats know and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what's around you.

you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That

The wraith responds vehemently that...No! No! Any conversation or interchange is better than none at all, to trust him on this, that the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hiddenness on either side

Himself had apparently thought the stilted, wooden quality of nonprofessionals helped to strip away the pernicious illusion of realism and to remind the audience that they were in reality watching actors acting and not people behaving.

His white knit shirt and name-brand shorts were soaked through so you could see the straps of his jock biting into the soft ass I was handing him. He

I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.' 'But then how do you know they're monsters, then?' 'That's the monstrosity right there, Boo, I'm starting to think.' 'Golly Ned.' 'That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced.

There's not any real forwardness to it. You don't sense it's straining to get anywhere. The thing it makes you see as she reads is something heavy swinging slowly at the end of a long rope.

I had to face: I had chosen. My choice, this was love. I had chosen I think the way out of the chains of the cage. I needed this woman. Without her to choose over myself, there was only pain and not choosing, rolling drunkenly and making fantasies of death.

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. That is real freedom. That is being educated and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race.

Empecé a desesperarme. Empecé a sentir que me quedaría colgado de esa terapia, que nunca hallaría la respuesta y que el asunto no tendría fin. Que tendría esos interfaces kafkianos con este hombre día tras día, semana tras semana. Ya era mayo.

Julie le ha dicho a Faye que cree que los amantes pasan por tres fases distintas cuando empiezan a conocerse bien. Primero intercambian anécdotas y gustos. Después se cuentan las cosas en que creen. Y luego cada uno examina la relación entre lo que el otro dice que cree y lo que hace en realidad.

Mean-Value Theorem for Integrals, 123 but for Hal's synoptic purposes here it's enough to say that megatonnage is distributed among Combatants according to an integrally regressed ratio of (a)

My father's mood surrounded him like a field and affected any room he occupied, like an odor or a certain cast to the light.

Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.

The inactive viewer's screen is the color of way out over the Atlantic looking straight down on a cold day.

What fire dies when you feed it? It

My fingers are mated into a mirrored series of what manifests, to me, as the letter X.

Not real bright—she thought the figure he'd trace without thinking on her bare flank after sex was the numeral 8, to give you an idea.

That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work.

Being the worst confirmation of the worst kind of generation gap stereotype and parental disgust for their decadent, wastoid kids

What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn't wrong with other people? What if he was simple ill-suited, the way some people are born without limbs or certain organs? The neurology of failure. What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?

The counter woman seemed unaware that Toni Ware was affecting the exact accent and cadence of her own speech. The assumption that everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

The kid has to learn by his own experience how to learn to balance the short- and long-term pursuit of what he wants.' 'He must be freely enlightened to self.' 'This is the crux of the educational system you find so appalling. Not to teach what to desire. To teach how to be free. To teach how to make knowledgeable choices about pleasure and delay and the kid's overall down-the-road maximal interests.

try looking in the mirror and determining where you stand in the attractiveness-hierarchy with anything like the objective ease you can determine whether just about anyone else you know is good-looking or not—but