Quotes from David Foster Wallace

It's painful to believe that the would-be public servants you're forced to choose between are all phonies whose only real concern is their own care and feeding and who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they've just got to believe you're an idiot. So who wouldn't yawn and turn away, trade apathy and cynicism for the hurt of getting treated with contempt?

The happy pleasure of the person alone, yes..?

you are in motion a prince and in repose a sage.

It´s all optional. Do it or die.

Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.

lo más peligroso que tiene la educación académica, por lo menos en mi caso, es que habilita mi tendencia a intelectualizar las cosas en exceso, a perderme en el pensamiento abstracto en lugar de limitarme a prestar atención a lo que está pasando delante de mí. Y en lugar de prestar atención a lo que está pasando dentro de mí.

Also essential to math is the sense in which abstracting something can mean reducing it to its absolute skeletal essence, as in the abstract of an article or book. As such, it can mean thinking hard about things that for the most part people can't think hard about-because it drives them crazy.

Sono l'unica persona al mondo ad essere convinta che la causa del numero crescente di fatti di cronaca in cui persone all'apparenza assolutamente normali cominciano a sparare con pistole automatiche nei centri commerciali, nelle agenzie di assicurazione, nelle cliniche private e nei McDonald's dipende anche dal fatto che posti del genere sono ben noti vivai di propagazione del Sorriso Professionale?

And then also, again, still, what are those boundaries, if they're not baselines, that contain and direct its infinite expansion inward, that make tennis like chess on the run, beautiful and infinitely dense? Schtitt's

The truth is that there's no difference between a life and a story? But a life pretends to be something more? But it really isn't more? LENORE:

the boot, which was dull black and square-heeled, the motorcycle boot of persons who did not own motorcycles but wore the boots of those who did.

People turned out so identical in certain root domestic particulars it made Gately feel strange sometimes, like he was in possession of certain overlarge private facts to which no man should be entitled.

Some days you can almost see Hal like flit in and out of a match, like some part of him leaves and hovers and then comes back.

Still, though. Right. Exactly.

To try and forget, rasa the tabula, wipe the memory totally out, numb it with opiates.

Julie ha detto a Faye che lei è convinta che due persone innamorate attraversino tre fasi distinte prima di arrivare a conoscersi davvero. All'inizio si raccontano aneddoti e gusti personali. Poi ciascuno dei due dice all'altro in che cosa crede. E poi ciascuno osserva la relazione che c'è fra quello in cui l'altro ha detto di credere e quello che in effetti fa .

and this is what really seemed to drive them right over the edge, out there in the lot) until Further Notice. Apeshit has rarely enjoyed so literal a denotation.

To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism.

if you're poor old Mario Incandenza you take your competitive strokes where you can find them.

All on a real superficial-type level, since Watson's basically got like a little liquid-filled nubbin at the top of his spine where his brain ought to be.

She would- never mind. She was his servant. Slave mentality. This was not the girl I asked to marry me. She was his slave and believed she knew only joy...where was my wife? What was this creature she stroked and sucked at...

And yet this nauseated feeling has come and gone for you in the past, it's passed eventually during prior depressions, Katherine, has it not?' 'But when you're in the feeling you forget. The feeling feels like it's always been there and will always be there, and you forget. It's like this whole filter drops down over the whole way you think about everything, a couple weeks after—

Unless he actually had a lit gasper going, Calvin Thrust always has this way of being only technically wherever he was. There was always this air of imminent departure about him, like a man whose beeper was about to sound. It's like a lit gasper was psychic ballast for him or something. Everything he said to Gately seemed like it was going to be the last thing he said right before he looked at his watch and slapped his forehead and left.

What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, 'I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it,' the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through?