Quotes from David Foster Wallace

For irony—exploiting gaps between what's said and what's meant, between how things try to appear and how they really are—is the time-honored way artists seek to illuminate and explode hypocrisy.

Some of the stars seemed to flutter, others to burn with more steadiness.

The top seed this weekend is Richard Krajicek,12 a 6?5? Dutchman who wears a tiny white billed hat in the sun and rushes the net like it owes him money and in general plays like a rabid crane.

What teachers and the administration in that era never appeared to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration.

Everyone hates the boy. It is a complex hatred, one that often causes the haters to feel mean and guilty and to hate themselves for feeling this way about such an accomplished and well-meaning boy, which then tends to make them involuntarily hate the boy even more for arousing such self-hatred. The whole thing is totally confusing and upsetting. People take a lot of aspirin when he's around.

Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.

In the eighth American-educational grade, Bruce Green fell dreadfully in love with a classmate who had the unlikely name of Mildred Bonk. The name was unlikely because if ever an eighth-grader looked like a Daphne Christianson or a Kimberly St.-Simone or something like that, it was Mildred Bonk.

I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, is identical to those worst dreams' form itself: the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares' very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: it's just been... overlooked; and then that horrific interval between realizing what you've overlooked and turning your head to look back at what's been right there all along, the whole time...

Picture millions of average nonabnormal North Americans, all implanted with Briggs electrodes, all with electronic access to their own personal p-terminals, never leaving home, thumbing their personal stimulation levers over and over.

desire is the sugar in human food.

Marathe was prepared to die violently at any time, which rendered him free to choose among emotions.

John Ziegler is not a journalist-he is an entertainer. Or maybe it's better to say that he is part of a peculiar, modern, and very popular type of news industry, one that manages to enjoy authority and influence of journalism without the stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity, and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved. It is a frightening industry, though not for any of the simple reasons most critics give.

sometimes in the same week. There might even be—though

Lucien finally dies, rather a while after he's quit shuddering like a clubbed muskie and seemed to them to die, as he finally sheds his body's suit, Lucien finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted over fans and the Convexity's glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world's well-known tongues.

Denial,' Charlotte finally says, 'is not a river in Egypt.' 'Hows about the both of you shut the fuck up,' says Emil Minty.

sentence-by-sentence basis—that it's okay if a person

Hal is maybe the one male E.T.A. for whom lifetime virginity is a conscious goal.

The extreme mathematical weirdness of (infinity), which Galileo spends a lot of time in TNS giving examples of, is rather presciently attributed to epistemology instead of metaphysics. Paradoxes arise, according to G.G.'s mouthpiece, only when we attempt, with our finite minds, to discuss the infinite, assigning to it those properties which we give to the finite and limited.

greater when one's mind has been exercised and thus

The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations.

Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded engagement of the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young.

Only in Boston AA can you hear a fifty-year-old immigrant wax lyrical about his first solid bowel movement in adult life.

Be a Student of the Game. Like most clichés of sport, this is profound. You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard.

Rod and Tom and I had that three-planked platform-exhibit. One: waste. Two: no new enhancements. Three: find somebody outside the borders of our community selves to blame. T