Quotes from David Foster Wallace

Chu says '… that because you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus, so there's like radical improvement up to a certain plateau and then what looks like a stall, on the plateau, with the only way to get off one of the plateaus and climb up to the next one up ahead is with a whole lot of frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience and hanging in there.

Marathe shrugged. 'Us, we will force nothing on U.S.A. persons in their warm homes. We will make only available. Entertainment. There will be then some choosing, to partake or choose not to.

and oral narcotics addicts tend to operate on an extremely rigid physical schedule of need and satisfaction, and Gately is at this moment firmly in the need part of the schedule;

Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn't even know he believed until it exits his mouth in front of five anxious little hairless plump trusting clueless faces. The

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is really freedom. That is being taught how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race - the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

that they always give their horoscope readers (like Joyce every morning, over vegetable juice she made herself in a special machine) that special eerie feeling of particularity and insight, exploiting the psychological fact that most people are narcissistic and prone to the illusion that they and their problems are uniquely special and that if they're feeling a certain way then surely they're the only person who is feeling like that.

David Cronenberg's mainstream Crash comes out of absolutely nowhere to win something called Best Alternative Adult Feature Film.

Or that he's slow, Hal's brother is, technically, Stanford-Binet-wise, slow, the Brandeis C.D.C. found---but not, verifiably not, retarded or cognitively damaged or bradyphrenic, more like refracted, almost, ever so slightly epistemically bent, a pole poked into mental water and just a little off and just taking a little bit longer, in the manner of all refracted things.

The Great White Male is rap's Grand Inquisitor, its idiot questioner, its Alien Other no less than Reds were for McCarthy.

Movies are an authoritarian medium. They vulnerabilize you and then dominate you

The Greeks were the real inventors of what we call math, because-again-they were the first people to treat numbers and their relations as abstractions rather than as properties of collections of real things.

Of course, in men's sports no one ever talks about beauty, or grace, or the body. Men may profess their "love" of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive stats and technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc.

It strikes me that EXIT signs would look to a native speaker of Latin like red-lit signs that say HE LEAVES.

For the record, Parmenides' metaphysics-which is even wilder than the D.B.P's, and in retrospect seems more like Eastern religion than Western philosophy-is describable as a kind of static monism, and Zeno's paradoxes (of which there are really more than four) are accordingly directed against the reality of (1) plurality and (2) continuity. For present purposes we are concerned with (2), which for Zeno takes the form, as Russell mentions, of regular physical motion.

He looks mean in a kind of distant way.

peacocks of diverse idiosyncrasy

I spent a lot of time as a volunteer in a nursing home in Amherst last summer. I was reading Dante's Divine Comedy to an old man, Mr. Shulman. One day, I asked him where he was from. He said, 'Just east of here, the Rockies.' I said, 'Mr. Shulman, the Rockies are west of here.' He did a voilà with his hands, and then said, 'I move mountains.' That stuck with me. Fiction either moves mountains it it's boring; it moves mountains or it sits on its ass. -Interview with Larry McCaffery (1993)

Pat told Gately that grim honesty and hopelessness were the only things you need to start recovering from Substance-addiction, but that without these qualities you were totally up the creek.

OCCIDERE POSSUNT SED TE EDERE NON POSSUNT NEFAS EST 32—and

In his numb helpless black isolation he he needs the emotional center of his life, the object of his complete adoration, his fiancée, more than ever; and yet he knows that it is precisely his state of helpless, in-efficacious isolation- a state he is in through exactly zero fault of his own- that is of necessity driving the lovely woman he adores farther and farther away.

The executive intern never brushed her hair after a shower. She just gave her head two or three shakes and let it fall gloriously where it might and turned, slightly, to give Ellen Bactrian the full effect: 'Who?' She had ten weeks left to live.

The truth will set you free, but not until it's done with you.' The

The Moms revealed that if you're not crazy then speaking to someone who isn't there is termed apostrophe and is valid art.

It was the Greeks who turned math into an abstract system, a special symbolic language that allows people not just to describe the concrete world but to account for its deepest patterns and laws.