Quotes from David Foster Wallace

As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M. Tine's grand love. It means only the attachment. Tine is attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.

The jokes theory was there's no audience and no director and no stage or set because, The Mad Stork and his cronies argued, in Reality there are none of these things. And the protagonist doesn't know he's the protagonist in a Found Drama because in Reality nobody thinks they're in any sort of Drama.

The joke's theory was there's no audience and no director and no stage or set because, The Mad Stork and his cronies argued, in Reality there are none of these things. And the protagonist doesn't know he's the protagonist in a Found Drama because in Reality nobody thinks they're in any sort of Drama.

Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.

That's why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. They're not saying effortless in terms of it didn't seem like the writer spent any work. It simply requires no effort to read it — the same way listening to an incredible storyteller talk out loud requires no effort to pay attention. Whereas when you're bored, you're conscious of how much effort is required to pay attention.

Right from the start, what I liked best about the analyst was that his office was a mess.

David Foster Wallace understood the paradox of attempting to write fiction that spoke to posterity and a contemporary audience simultaneously

It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely giftes as athletes, are the only ones truly able to see, articulate and animate the experience of the gift we are denied.

there. I want to be like that. Able to just sit all quiet and pull life toward me, one forehead at a time. His name is supposedly Lyle. It was yrstruly and C and Poor Tony that crewed that day and everything like that. The

Infinite Jest specifically: an endlessly, compulsively entertaining book that stingily withholds from readers the core pleasures of mainstream novelistic entertainment, among them a graspable central narrative line, identifiable movement through time

all feet and teeth, is a shadowy lurking presence

It's not like he kept the money. It's not like he needed it. I think he especially liked the idea that the star of the show might have already moved away or recently died and there was no way to know.

He took zero in the way of shit

The dignity of a man risen by will from the ashes of Withdrawal and now on the upswing and with places to go and potentially considerate Canadians to see.

Not even the masters of the high/low rhetorical register go higher more panoramically or lower more exuberantly than Wallace—not Joyce, not Bellow, not Amis.

swollen and perfectly round, and large, radiating knives of light...It hung and trembled slightly like a viscous drop about to fall.

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?

So while a thing in a finite time cannot come in contact with things quantitatively infinite, it can come in contact with things infinite in respect of divisibility: for in this sense the time itself is also infinite.

It's going to be interesting to see if [sic] Hal, who thinks he's just too sly trying to outline Eschaton in the 3rd-person tense [sic] like some jowly old Eschatologist with leather patches on his elbows [sic], if Inc can transpose [sic?] the math here without help from his Mumster. Later. P.S. Allston Rules.

Supongo que ser tímido significa básicamente estar absorbido por uno mismo hasta el punto de que se hace difícil estar rodeado de otras personas

neighbor I say to you: forget for a moment the Entertainment, and think instead about a U.S.A. where such a thing could be possible enough for your Office to fear: can such a U.S.A. hope to survive for a much longer time? To survive as a nation of peoples? To much less exercise dominion over other nations of other peoples? If these are other peoples who still know what it is to choose?

Tiene que ver con llegar a los treinta años, o incluso a los cincuenta, sin querer pegarte un tiro en la cabeza.

wondered why the presence of Americans could always make him feel vaguely ashamed after saying things he believed.

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....That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced.