Quotes from David Foster Wallace

What I was thinking is is this maybe a textbook case of Johnny-Gentle-type-find-an-enemy-for-a-divided-nation-to-come-together-by-blaming-and-hating theory in action?

There's something elementally horrific about waking before dawn.

Subjects locked away in institutions and written off as casualties of peace.

MR. YEE: Urgle. Urgle urgle. Splarg. Kaa. [Falls from chair.] MR. TINE JR.: Holy mackerel.

It's like he's frozen on this anxiety, unable to move on to more advanced anxieties.

Irony and hip ennui are extremely authoritarian.

central conundra of millennial après-garde film, most of which, in the teleputer age of home-only entertainment, involved the question why so much aesthetically ambitious film was so boring and why so much shitty reductive commercial entertainment was so much fun.

I was looking at my sneakers and making my feet alternately pigeon-toed and then penguin-toed on the bedroom's blue carpet.

Matriculations, gender quotas, recruiting, financial aid, room-assignments, mealtimes, rankings, class v. drill schedules, prorector-hiring, accommodating changes in drill schedule consequent to a player's movement up or down a squad. It's all the sort of thing that's uninteresting unless you're the one responsible, in which case it's cholesterol-raisingly stressful and complex.

I was enjoying being one horizontal object in a room filled with horizontality.

Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practicing and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent's unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play. The irony is that this makes you very good, and you start to become regarded as having a prodigious talent to live up to.

Mettiamo che Nonna mi abbia detto in maniera parecchio convincente che tutto ciò che davvero esiste della mia vita è limitato a quello che se ne può raccontare. Be', credo che non sia esattamente che la vita va raccontata anziché vissuta; è piuttosto che la vita è il suo racconto, e che in me non c'è niente che non sia o raccontato o raccontabile. Ma se è davvero così, allora che differenza c'è, perché vivere?

that Joelle even now lives hand-to-lung on a grossly generous trust willed her by a man she unveiled for but never slept with, the prodigious punter's father, infinite jester, director of a final opus so magnum he'd claimed to have had it locked away.

both of whom give Avril a howling case of the maternal fantods.

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

Let's not sit around and give each other hand-jobs.

Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti- interesting? Because

Fictionally speaking, desire is the sugar in human food.

unpleasant-fact specialist

the feeling that you'd do absolutely anything or say or trade anything to persuade him to simply settle for rape and let you go, or even torture, even willing to bring to the bargaining table a bit of nonlethal torture if only he'd settle for hurting you and choose to drive off and leave you hurt and breathing in the weeds and sobbing at the sky and traumatized beyond all recovery instead of as nothing

It was really almost a 90-yard punt, and had the sort of hang-time the Special Teams Asst. said you could have tender and sensitive intercourse during.

Marathe said, 'This, is it not the choice of the most supreme importance? Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times?

It is like Swinburne sat down on his soul's darkest night and designed an organized sport.

This (the sunset) more resembled an explosion. It took place above and behind him, and he turned some of the time to regard it: it (the sunset) was swollen and perfectly round, and large, radiating knives of light when he squinted. It hung and trembled slightly like a viscous drop about to fall. It hung just above the peaks of the Tortolita foothills behind him (Marathe), and slowly was sinking.