Quotes from David Foster Wallace

Enfield MA is one of the stranger little facts that make up the idea that is metro Boston, because it is a township composed almost entirely of medical, corporate, and spiritual facilities.

Phoneless Cord in his stocking, ostentatiously packaged

That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil.

an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: 100 i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.

the man was so cross-eyed he could stand in the middle of the week and see both Sundays.

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose?

Respecting infinite sets, for example, Intuitionism is rabidly anti-Cantor and Formalism staunchly pro-Cantor, even though both Formalism and Intuitionism are anti-Plato and Cantor is a diehard Platonist. Which, migrainous or not, means we're back to metaphysics: the modern wrangle over math's procedures is ultimately a dispute over the ontological status of math entities.

when all the like props and stage-settings that let you just go around smugly assuming you're not a thing are ripped away and broken because all of a sudden now the world understands you as a thing, everybody else thinks you're a rat or a thing and now it's up to you, you're the only one that can decide if you're more.

She smelled of talcum powder and Big Red.

It says: 'Scenery is here. Wish you were beautiful.

You'd be doing us both a favor.' 'This drives me bats. You know this drives me bats.' Orin and Hal's term for this routine is Politeness Roulette. This Moms-thing that makes you hate yourself for telling her the truth about any kind of problem because of what the consequences will be for her. It's like to report any sort of need or problem is to mug her.

That a person who did something for somebody's gratitude was more like a 2-D cutout image of a person than a bona fide person.

It's when people begin to fancy that they actually know something about literature that they cease to be literarily interesting, or even of any use to those that are.

The whole quantum setup ends up being embarrassing in the special way something pretentious is embarrassing when it's also wrong.

Datum: At least one-third of ancient rulers' seers and magicians were in fact fired or killed early in their tenure because it emerged that the bulk of what they foresaw or intuited was irrelevant. Not incorrect, just irrelevant, pointless.

Over half the admits to psych wards are things like cheerleaders who swallow two bottles of Mydol over a high-school breakup or gray lonely asexual depressing people rendered inconsolable by the death of a pet. The cathartic trauma of actually going in somewhere

La vostra preoccupazione per ciò che gli altri pensano di voi scompare una volta che capite quanto di rado pensano a voi.

The 2-Man seniorest males' bedroom has a bunch of old AA bumper-stickers on it and a calligraphic poster saying EVERYTHING I'VE EVER LET GO OF HAS CLAW MARKS ON IT, and the answer to Gately's knock is a moan

A question, doctor, he said. Why doesn't the coyote take the money he spends on bird costumes and catapults and radioactive road runner food pellets and explosive missiles and simply go eat Chinese? He smiled coolly. Why doesn't the coyote simply go eat Chinese food?

His hands were no bigger than a four-year-old girl's. It was surreal. This massive authoritative figure, with a huge red meaty face and thick walrus mustache and dewlaps and a neck that spilled over the rim of his shirt-collar, and his hands were tiny and pink and hairless and butt-soft, delicate as shells. The hands were the capper. I barely made it out of the office before it started.

I fully grant that mysterious invisible room-cleaning is in a way great, every true slob's fantasy, somebody materializing and deslobbing your room and then dematerializing—like having a mom without the guilt.

I'm not saying I'm able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art's heart's purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It's got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.

There seemed to be so many implications even to thinking about sitting up and standing up and exiting V.R.5 and taking a certain variable-according-to-stride-length number of steps to the stairwell door, on and on, that just the thought of getting up made me glad I was lying on the floor.

My own plan for the coming fourteen months is to knock on doors and stuff envelopes. Maybe even to wear a button. To try to accrete with others into a demographically significant mass. To try extra hard to exercise patience, politeness, and imagination on those with whom I disagree. Also to floss more.