Quotes from David Foster Wallace

hindsight, the illusion appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it would be like being able both to lie and to trust other people at the same time.

Do you for one moment think that a professional plier of the trade of conversation would fail to probe beak-deep into your family's sordid liaison with the pan-Canadian Resistance's notorious M. DuPlessis and his malevolent but allegedly irresistible amanuensis-cum-operative, Luria P______?

college students and alcoholics/addicts are the worst: they deep-down believe they're exempt from the laws of physics and statistics that ironly govern everybody else.

That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you.

Documentary on renegade North Syracuse NNY turkey farmers' bid to prevent toxification of Thanksgiving crop by commandeering long, shiny O.N.A.N. trucks to transplant over 200,000 pertussive fowl south to Ithica.

Cantor's discovery that lines, planes, cubes, and polytopes were all equivalent as sets of points goes a long way toward explaining why set theory was such a revolutionary development for math-revolutionary in theory and practice both.

To make a long story short, Cantorian set theory helps unify and clarify math in the sense that all mathematical entities can now be understood as fundamentally the same kind of thing-a set.

Derivatives're just trig with some imagination.

Soy un turista americano, y por tanto 'ex officio' corpulento, rollizo, rubicundo, escandaloso, tosco, condescendiente, ensimismado, malcriado, preocupado por su aspecto, avergonzado, desesperante y codicioso.

Capii che gli ubriachi e gli storpi vengono trascinati fuori dall'arena come Cristi disossati, un uomo sotto ogni braccio, coi piedi che strisciano a terra, gli occhi al cielo.

the mystic approaches the hot-dog stand and tells the vendor Make me one with everything.

err on the side of neutrality

Another way fathers impact sons is that sons, once their voices have changed in puberty, invariably answer the telephone with the same locutions and intonations as their fathers. This holds true regardless of whether the fathers are still alive.

She kept . . . using the, well, the quote L-word itself several times without irony or any evident awareness that the word has through tactical over-deployment become trite and requires invisible quotes around it now at the very least.

legs which not even orange Keds with purple-glitter-encrusted laces could make unserious. Shy

Metafictionists may have had aesthetic theories out the bazoo, but they were also sentient citizens of a community that was exchanging an old idea of itself as a nation of doers and be-ers for a new vision of the U.S.A. as an atomized mass of self-conscious watchers and appearers.

But what G. Cantor posits as the defining formal property of an infinite set is that such a set can be put in a 1-1C with at least one of its proper subsets. Which is to say that an infinite set can have the same cardinal number as its proper subset, as in Galileo's infinite set of all positive integers and that set's proper subset of all perfect squares, which latter is itself an infinite set.

That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward. That it is permissible to want.

Möbius Strips. Year of the Whopper. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. 'Hugh G. Section,' Pam Heath, 'Bunny Day,' 'Taffy Appel'; 35 mm.; 109 minutes black and white; sound. Pornography-parody, possible parodic homage to Fosse's All That Jazz, in which a theoretical physicist ('Reaction'), who can only achieve mathematical insight during coitus, conceives of Death as a lethally beautiful woman (Heath). INTERLACE TALENT FEATURE CARTRIDGE #357-65-32 (Y.W.)

WE ARE WHAT WE WALK BETWEEN

Specifically, Aristotle claims that no spatial extension (e.g. the intercurb interval AB) is 'actually infinite,' but that all such extensions are 'potentially infinite' in the sense of being infinitely divisible.

He never leaves home, which home is one room, the converted Children's Reading Room of what used to be the Waltham Public Library, which is the whole third floor.

U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness: 'The happy pleasure of the person alone, yes?

no man put his tongue on D. W. Gately and lived