Quotes from David Foster Wallace

Julie has told Faye that she believes lovers go through three different stages in getting really to know one another. First they exchange anecdotes and inclinations. Then each tells the other what she believes. Then each observes the relation between what the other says she believes and what she in fact does.

You have wondered perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today's cowboys

What is unfair can be a stern but invaluable teacher.

How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away. Nets and fences can be mirrors. And between the nets and fences, opponents are also mirrors. This is why the whole thing is scary. This is why all opponents are scary and weaker opponents are especially scary.

Somebody has made those disgusting marshmallowy Rice Krispie things

You can be shaped, or you can be broken.

Fai ciao ciao al burocrate rimane il film favorito di Mario tra tutti quelli di loro padre, forse per la sua serietà così poco di moda. Anche se a Mario ha sempre detto che è troppo mieloso, piace anche a Hal, la cartuccia, e gli piace proiettarsi con l'immaginazione nel personaggio dell'ex burocrate mentre guida piacevolmente verso casa e verso la cancellazione deontologica.

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us deep down. It's our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of.

no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.

but let's emphasize once more here that G. Cantor is, like R. Dedekind, a mathematical Platonist; i.e., he believes that both infinite sets and transfinite numbers really exist, as in metaphysically, and that they are reflected in actual real-world infinities.....

No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own offspring open his mouth and have nothing come out.

these darkest mornings start days that Orin can't even bring himself for hours to think about how he'll get through the day. These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light—the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.

Puede ser apropiado hacer algo temible sin pensarlo, pero no cuando lo temible es el propio hecho de no pensar

Me imitaba cuando yo estaba molesto -solamente el amor de la vida de uno puede hacer esto- y a mí se me pasaba el enfado

The Tableaux were simply high-quality transmission-ready photographs, scaled down to diorama-like proportions and fitted with a plastic holder over the videophone camera, not unlike a lens-cap. Extremely good-looking but not terrifically successfully entertainment-celebrities - the same sort who in decades past would have swelled the cast-lists of infomercials - found themselves in demand as models for various high-end videophone Tableaux.

foamy enthusiasm with which these folks can say what in fact means nothing at all makes her want to put her head in a Radarange

Y tomaba mi silencio por aprobación. La esencia del abismo era que ella creía que no existía ningún abismo

The really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get at a [liberal arts college] isn't really about the capacity to think but, rather, the choice of what to think about

Their faces was different and their wife's faces in the truck, fine and showing teeth and him with a arm around the Mrs. and a wave at Daddy as they back out.

you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That

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.

You play right up to your limit and then pass your limit and look back at your former limit and wave a hankie at it, embarking.

Here is how to read the monthly E.T.A. and U.S.T.A. and O.N.A.N.T.A. rankings the way Himself read scholars' reviews of his multiple-exposure melodramas. Learn to care and not to care. They mean the rankings to help you determine where you are, not who you are. Memorize your monthly rankings, and forget them. Here is how: never tell anyone where you are.

most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That