Quotes from David Foster Wallace

A middle-aged tennis instructor preparing to instruct his son in tennis, becomes intoxicated in the family's garage and subjects his son to a rambling monologue while the son weeps and perspires.

As everyone is well aware, it is so difficult to do something nice for someone and not want them, desperately, to know that the identity of the individual who did it for them was you, and to feel grateful and approving towards you, and to tell myriads of other people what you 'did' for them, so that you can be widely acknowledged as a 'good' person.

Cuando la noche anterior Lenore Beadsman lloró frente a Andrew Sealander Lang fue la primera vez en su vida que había llorado frente a alguien. Rick Vigorous había llorado frente a montones de personas.

Castor beans' seed hulls must be removed by soaking 1-4 oz. of the beans in 12-36 oz. of distilled water with 4-6 tablespoons of NaOH or 6-8 ts. of commercial lye (the beans' natural buoyancy requiring here that they be weighted down with marbles, sterilized gravel, or low-value coins combined and tied in an ordinary Trojan condom).

Neoclassical Assumptions in Contemporary Prescriptive Grammar," "The Implications of Post-Fourier Transformations for a Holographically Mimetic Cinema," "The Emergence of Heroic Stasis in Broadcast Entertainment" —' ' "Montague Grammar and the Semantics of Physical Modality"?' ' "A Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass"?' ' "Tertiary Symbolism in Justinian Erotica"?

they can all stand quiescent in airless venues for extended periods, their eyes' expressions that unique NYC combination of Zen meditation and clinical depression, clearly unhappy but never complaining.

Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger secret is that he's as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high. filmic mind Everybody was tired in a good way. someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. novocaine of the soul The original sense of addiction involved being bound over, dedicated The addict

It's the same sort of block some people get with the Mean-Value Theorem. Or in Optics when we get to color fields. At a certain level of abstraction it's like the brain recoils.

The headmaster of a newly constructed high-altitude sports academy (Watt) becomes neurotically obsessed with litigation over the construction's ancillary damage to a V.A. hospital far below, as a way of diverting himself from his wife's (Heath's) poorly hidden affair with the academically renowned mathematical topologist who is acting as the project's architect ('Rection'). CELLULOID (UNRELEASED)

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.

That—to cut to a chase which the interviewers' hands-on-hip attitudes and replacement of the lamp's bulb with a much higher wattage signified they'd very much like to see cut to—as

The anaerobic saprophyte Clostridium botulinum is simple to culture, requiring only

headers from the last few great daily papers

And the dope often gave him a painful case of pleurisy if he smoked it for more than two straight days of heavy continuous smoking

The conjoined dogs were too distant to ascertain whether they had collars or tags, yet close enough that I could make out the expression on the face of the dominant dog above. It was blank and at the same time fervid—the same general expression as on a human being's face when he is doing something that he feels compulsively driven to do and yet does not understand just why he wants to do it.

A father (Watt), suffering from the delusion that his etymologically precocious son (Smothergill) is pretending to be mute, poses as a 'professional conversationalist' in order to draw the boy out.

mein kinder. Mein kinder, well it sort of means my family. He eyeballs me right square in the eye and says it's about how to reach down into parts of yourself you didn't know were there and get down in there and live inside these parts. And the only way to get to them: sacrifice. Suffer. Deny. What are you willing to give.

They Can Kill You, But The Legalities Of Eating You Are Quite A Bit Dicier

Gee," I say, "there are no sheets on this bed." The mouse looks at me. "Señor," he says, "if you sheet on my bed, I will keel you." We both laugh, and the mouse punches me in the arm.

The poor bitch is clueless. All of them are clueless, still.

Like most religious mathematicians from Pythagoras to Godel, Bolzano believes that math is the Language of God and that profound metaphysical truths can be derived and proved mathematically.

Worship your intellect, being seing as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge og being found out. And so on.

An alcohol hangover was definitely no frolic in the psychic glade, all thirsty and sick and your eyes bulging and receding with your pulse, but after a night of involved hallucinogens Hal said the dawn seemed to confer on his psyche a kind of pale sweet aura, a luminescence. Halation, Axford observed.

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 or it's boring; it moves mountains or it sits on its ass. -Interview with Larry McCaffery (1993)